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 four or more years ago.      

“CESAR BIROTTEAU” by Honore de Balzac (written in the early 1830s; published 1837) (original French title Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Decadence de Cesar Birotteau, sometimes translated into English as The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau)

 

It you have followed this blog for a number of years, you will be aware that I am very much a fan of the novels of Honore de Balzac. In the last eleven years I have commented on Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin (written 1830-31) ; Eugenie Grandet (written 1833); Le Pere Goriot (written 1835); La Rabouilleuse (written 1842) ; La Cousine Bette (written 1846); and Le Cousin Pons (written 1847). I also did a piece on Balzac’s Selected Short Stories . Eugenie Grandet is the novel French schoolchildren were once given as a set text, perhaps because its simple story includes no whiff of unapproved sexual activities. Le Pere Goriot is often cited as Balzac’s masterpiece for its concision and pitiless sense of tragedy. La Cousine Bette is a wonderfully bitchy account of heartless manoeuvring in arriviste society. La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep) has, I think, Balzac’s most ingenious plot. And I like Le Cousin Pons as his most compassionate novel.

But even as a dedicated Balzacian, I am aware that the man’s work has many faults. Some of his shorter novels serve no purpose other than connecting different parts of his grandiose design for a Human Comedy, telling us how this person in the series is related to that person. They are like accounts in a ledger. He can easily go melodramatic (giving the likes of snobbish critic Martin Turnell the opportunity to call him “vulgar”) and he can lose the plot when he inserts long passages of explanations about society or the specifics of a city’s design, taking him far from the narrative he is building. These are pointless digressions where he shows off what he hopes we will see as his profound knowledge.

 

What I’m making clear is that, despite being a very great novelist, Balzac sometimes wrote very badly. And on this posting I am giving you the evidence in the form of what I regard as the dullest novel he ever wrote – a painful thing to read. If you want to deter anyone from reading Balzac’s works, direct that person to Cesar Birotteau. It is as flat as a pancake and most of it reads like a chronicle of financial dealings. Set in France’s Restoration period, the story takes place between the years 1817 and 1820. It is organized in three parts

Part One: Cesar Birotteau, of peasant stock, has been raised by a wealthy merchant family in Paris. They are retailers of perfume, with strongly royalist views but with little understanding of human nature. Cesar Birotteau has risen to being deputy mayor of a Paris arrondissement, and he is about to be awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour. He decides to throw an extravagant ball, and also to move into the big league of merchants and financiers by borrowing money to make large investments in land purchase and by making himself a “sleeping partner” in a firm – to be headed by his faithful clerk Anselme Popinot - manufacturing a hair preparative to rival Macassar oil (which was, at the time, the most esteemed hair-lotion for men). This first part of the novel simply chronicles his business deals with bankers, with an architect to redo his house, with his neighbour the chemist Vauqelin to advise him on his business ventures etc. Little does he know that his former clerk Ferdinand du Tillet is plotting his financial ruin. Of course this first section of the novel ends with Birotteau’s lavish ball – his moments of “Grandeur”.

Part Two shows his ruin, his “Decadence”. Almost immediately after his extravagant ball, the chickens come home to roost. The notary Roguin absconds with the borrowed money that supported Cesar’s major investments. Cesar is unable to pay the bills for either the ball or his business ventures. Facing bankruptcy, he attempts to shield his wife Constance and his daughter Cesarine from the truth, while trudging from banker to banker attempting to float a loan. But he has no credit. He is bankrupted. Wife and daughter have to go out and work while the treacherous clerk du Tillet has the malicious triumph of humiliating his former master with mock benevolence.

Part Three: And yet with good advice from his father-in-law Claude-Joseph Pilleraut, the help of Popinot and his own fortitude, Cesar works hard to pay off his debts and succeeds eventually in having them liquidated. Morally, du Tillet is defeated when Cesar is eventually reinstated as a merchant by the court, and he receives an ovation at the Bourse. He returns home in triumph but (on the very last page) he bursts a blood vessel and dies for joy when he finds a reception set up for him with the same splendour as on the night of the ball. An ironical ending, of course, but still essentially the story of a rich man who loses his fortune but regains it by hard work and the help of good friends.

In a way, reading this novel confirms my belief that Balzac was a genius, but sometimes an idiot genius. For some readers, Cesar Birotteau bears out the idea that Balzac was obsessed with money. There are some vivid stand-alone scenes – the ball itself (with Balzac noting the fine gradations of social distinction among the guests); or Cesar’s pathetic confrontations with some of his creditors. There are also moments of psychological insight – the treacherous clerk du Tillet hates Cesar because, years previously, Cesar forgave him for stealing from the till. No good deed goes unpunished. Save for the final death scene, the plot is not unduly melodramatic.

Yet as a whole the novel is crushingly dull. Fully the first half of the novel is little more than a chronicle of successive business deals, complete with accounting of every last crown, franc and sou. Balzac seems to assume that his readers will be as enthralled with this scrupulous accounting as much as he himself obviously is. In this case, his attempts at philosophising (on society, on success, on morals) are shallow. His real gift as a novelist lies in realising individuals. Ultimately, what stays most in the mind is the caricature that Cesar Birotteau is, with his repeated boast of having been wounded in a skirmish defending royalty, his innocent self-importance, pomposity and basic ignorance of how the world of finance works, until wiser people guide him out of his ruin. There is at least the possibility that Balzac himself had some misgivings about this novel. He said he first drafted it six or seven years before he handed it over to publishers because he was uncertain whether there was a readership for a story about a minor middle-class perfumier and purveyor of hair-oil. He might also have had misgivings about the fact that his main character was based loosely on a real perfumier, Jean Vincent Bully.

Naturally we can look at it as an historical and sociological document. Apart from the generous people who help Cesar out of his troubles, France’s Restoration period is seen as the era of ruthless wheeler-dealers, charlatans, bogus financiers and self-interested social climbers. Of course some of these are people who recur in other of Balzac’s work – the publicist Felix Gaudissart, the banker de Nucigen and others. But verbal portrait after verbal portrait of such people adds up to a very tedious novel and, “happy ending” notwithstanding, the only message one can take from this novel is that honest dimwits like Cesar Birotteau will always be squelched by sharpers.

Truly, a novel not to read first if you want to become acquainted with Balzac’s work.