A Response to Balzac

After all, I was a French major in college and I went on to study French in graduate school, so, if I'm going to read Balzac, I'll read him in French – not with the idea of showing off or anything.

I just finished reading his novella, “La bourse,” which I took to mean “the stock exchange” and not “the purse,” which, in fact, is what it did mean, and I kept expecting Balzac to start talking about financial speculation. In the light of my expectations, the opening sentences of the story, which are masterful, puzzled me, because I wondered how he was going to get from a description of twilight to the mercenary rough and tumble of the stock exchange.

Here they are the first four sentences:

Il est pour les âmes faciles à s’épanouir une heure délicieuse qui survient au moment où la nuit n’est pas encore et où le jour n’est plus.

For souls that expand easily, there is a delicious hour that arrives at the moment when it is not yet night, but it is no longer day.

La lueur crépusculaire jette alors ses teintes molles ou ses reflets bizarres sur tous les objets, et favorise une rêverie qui se marie vaguement aux jeux de la lumière et de l’ombre.

Then the twilight glow throws soft colors and bizarre reflections on every object, and encourages a reverie that vaguely marries with the play of light and shadow.

Le silence qui règne presque toujours en cet instant le rend plus particulièrement cher aux artistes qui se recueillent, se mettent à quelques pas de leurs œuvres auxquelles ils ne peuvent plus travailler, et ils les jugent en s’enivrant du sujet dont le sens intime éclate alors aux yeux intérieurs du génie.

The silence that almost always reigns at that instant makes it more particularly precious to artists, who withdraw and place themselves a few steps away from their paintings, which they can no longer work on, and they judge them, becoming inebriated with the subject whose intimate meaning bursts forth then to the inner eyes of genius.

Celui qui n’est pas demeuré pensif près d’un ami, pendant ce moment de songes poétiques, en comprendra difficilement les indicibles bénéfices.

Anyone who has not remained thoughtful next to a friend during this moment of poetical dreams will understand its indescribable benefits only with difficulty.

What brilliant writing! He immediately puts the reader in exactly the mood with which he or she is meant to read the whole story, which is about the difficulty of figuring out who certain people are, and he tells us what kind of people we must be: readers whose souls expand easily, people who fall into reveries, people who find a moment of silence precious, people with the inner eyes of genius, who can get high on art, people who can be thoughtful and sympathetic. In short, romantics.

Forget the clarity of the Enlightenment! Let's have “poetical dreams.”

Balzac is writing about the Restoration, after the collapse of the revolution and the downfall of Napoleon, a time when people weren't sure who was who, and new elite of artistic geniuses like Hippolyte, the hero of “La bourse,” was emerging and, magically, as it were, also getting rich. It's a period of half-light, and Balzac enjoys it, at least here, without anxiety.

His Human Comedy contains ninety-one volumes, I believe. I doubt that I'll plow through them all, but, intermingled with some Trollope for a different kind of romantic relief, I plan to spend a good deal of time in Balzac's company.