Little French Masterpieces

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Honoré de Balzac. Little French Masterpieces

INTRODUCTION

The Unknown Masterpiece

I. GILLETTE

II. CATHERINE LESCAULT

A Seashore Drama

An Episode under the Terror

La Grande Bretèche

The Conscript

A Passion in the Desert

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Balzac's short stories, which we call in French nouvelles are, generally speaking, not the best-known or the most popular part of his work; nor are they the part best fitted to give a true and complete idea of his genius. But some of them are none the less masterpieces in their kind; they have characteristics and a significance not always possessed by their author's long novels, such as Eugénie Grandet or Cousin Pons; and finally, for this very reason, they hold in the unfinished structure of The Human Comedy a place which it will be interesting to try to determine. That is all that will be attempted in this Introduction.Some of the stories contained in the present volume were written under curious circumstances. In the first place it is to be noted that they all date from 1830, 1831, and 18321 and therefore precede the conception and planning of The Human Comedy. Their value is far from being diminished by that fact. An Episode under the Terror (1830), for instance, was composed as an introduction to the Memoirs of Sanson – that executioner who of all executioners in the world's history probably despatched the fewest criminals and yet shed the most blood; and the Memoirs themselves, which are entirely apocryphal, are also in part Balzac's own work. But, though composed in this way, to order and as a piece of hack work, An Episode under the Terror is in its artistic brevity one of Balzac's most tragic and most finished narratives. La Grande Bretèche (1832) was at first only an episode inserted among the more extended narratives of which it made part, as in the old-fashioned novel of tales within tales of which Gil Blas is the type; and brief as it is, Balzac nevertheless rewrote it three or four times. It is therefore anything but an improvisation. Yet no other of these short stories can give more vividly than La Grande Bretèche the impression of a work sprung at once in full completeness from its author's brain, and conceived from the very first in its indivisible unity. But, precisely, it is one of the characteristic traits of Balzac's genius that we hardly need to know when or for what purpose he wrote this or that one of his novels or stories. He bore them all within him at once – we might say that the germ of them was preëxistent in him before he had any conscious thought of objectivising them. His characters were born in him, as though from all eternity, before he knew them himself; and before he himself suspected it, The Human Comedy was alive, was confusedly moving, was slowly shaping itself, in his brain. This point must be clearly seen before he can be understood or appreciated at his true value. However much interest a monograph on some animal or plant may have in itself – and that interest, no doubt, is often great – it has far more through the relations it bears to other monographs and to the whole field of knowledge of which its subject is only a fragmentary part. So it is with Balzac's novels and stories. Their interest is not limited to themselves. They bring out one another's value and significance, they illustrate and give importance to each other; they have, outside themselves, a justification for existence. This will become clear if we compare Mérimée's Mateo Falcone; for instance, with A Seashore Drama (1835). The subject is the same: in each case it is a father who constitutes himself justiciary of the honour of his race. But while Mérimée's work, though perhaps better written or at least engraved with deeper tooling, is after all nothing but an anecdote, a sensational news-item, a story of local manners, Balzac's is bound up with a whole mass of ideas, not to say a whole social philosophy, of which it is, properly speaking, only a chapter; and of which The Conscript (1831) is another.

But why did Balzac confine some of his subjects within the narrow limits of the nouvelle, while he expanded others to the dimensions of epic, we might say, or of history? It was because, though analogies are numerous between natural history and what we may call social history or the natural history of society, yet their resemblance is not complete nor their identity absolute. There are peculiarities or variations of passion which, though physiologically or pathologically interesting, are socially insignificant and can be left out of account: for instance, A Passion in the Desert (1830), or The Unknown Masterpiece (1831). It is rare, in art, for the passionate pursuit of progress to result only, as with Frenhofer, in jumbling the colours on a great painter's canvas; and, even were this less rare, artists are not very numerous! So, if the writer gave to his narrative of this painful but infrequent adventure as full a development, if he diversified and complicated it with as many episodes and details as the adventures of Baron Hulot in Cousin Bette or those of Madame de Mortsauf in The Lily in the Valley, he would thereby attribute to it, socially or historically, an importance it does not possess. He would err, and would make us err with him, regarding the true proportions of things. He would represent the humanity which he was attempting to depict, in a manner far from consistent with reality. Hence may be deduced the æsthetics of the nouvelle, and its distinction from the conte, and also from the roman or novel.

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"Yes," Porbus replied. "Old Frenhofer is the only pupil whom Mabuse would ever consent to take. Having become his friend, his saviour, his father, Frenhofer sacrificed the greater part of his property to humour Mabuse's passions; in exchange Mabuse bequeathed to him the secret of relief, the power of imparting to figures that extraordinary appearance of life, that touch of nature, which is our never-ending despair, but of which he was such a thorough master that one day, having sold and drunk the flowered damask which he was to wear on the occasion of Charles V.'s entry into Paris, he attended his master in a garment of paper painted to represent damask. The peculiar brilliancy of the fabric worn by Mabuse surprised the Emperor, who, when he attempted to compliment the old drunkard's patron, discovered the fraud.

"Frenhofer is passionately devoted to our art, and he looks higher and farther ahead than other painters. He has given much profound thought to the subject of colouring and to the absolute accuracy of lines; but he has studied so much that he has reached the point where he is uncertain of the very object of his studies. In his moments of despair he declares that drawing does not exist and that only geometrical figures can be made with lines; which is going beyond the truth, for with lines and with black, which is not a colour, a human figure maybe drawn; which proves that our art, like nature, is made up of an infinite number of elements: drawing furnishes a skeleton, colour gives life; but life without the skeleton is much less complete than the skeleton without life. In short, there is one thing which is more true than any of these, and that is that practice and observation are everything with a painter, and that, if reason and poetic sense quarrel with the brush, we arrive at doubt, like our excellent friend here, who is as much madman as painter. A sublime artist, he was unfortunate enough to be born rich, which permitted him to go astray; do not imitate him! Work! Painters ought not to meditate, except with brush in hand."

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