The center of Balzac’s
La Rabouilleuse is elusive. Though the book is a part of Balzac’s Scenes
of Provincial Life a good part of the narrative occurs in Paris. The family dynamics between Joseph, Phillipe,
and their mother seem to be heart of the book until Flore appears and then
Maxence with their designs on the Rouget money.
The unusual
instability of the novel’s title reflects this thematic ambiguity. First published as Les Deux Frères
in 1840, it became Un Ménage de Garçon
in 1842 and then La Rabouilleuse in 1843. The final choice is perhaps the most puzzling
as Flore, la rabouilleuse herself, has a limited role and is clearly
more a motive than an active agent in the plot. In translation it has appeared as The Black
Sheep in Donald Adamson’s version, as A Bachelor’s Establishment in Clara
Bell’s, and as The Two Brothers in Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s.
Clearly these
shifts in the title imply an uncertainty about the central theme of the
story. While the original title focuses
on the comparison of Joseph and Phillipe, the second seems to turn primarily to
Joseph as protagonist, though it remains uncertain whether the “bachelor” is
Phillipe before his marriage, or Joseph whose ménage
includes his mother.
Balzac’s comments
in a brief avant-propos only complicate the question of the book’s
primary subject further. Balzac claims
in a dedication to Charles Nodier that his principal theme is to point out the
harm done by the weakening of patriarchy.
Few readers might have guessed.
He explains that his story carries “a great lesson for the family and
for Motherhood” by calling attention to “the effects of diminished paternal
authority.” In fact, he finds a general
decay of morality in modern society which he finds “based solely on the power
of money.” For Balzac as an orthodox
believer, the remedy is obvious: the country must “return to the Catholic Church
for purification of the masses by religious feeling” and all will be well. [1]
All these highly
conventional opinions seem to have little, though, to do with the narrative in
spite of the author’s assertions. Only
in a harsh verdict on Agathe’s husbandless household and her acting the hapless
woman by preferring her ne’er-do-well son to the dutiful one might “diminished
paternal authority” be relevant to the plot.
Dr. Rouget, a strong husband of the previous generation, clearly errs in
his mistreatment of his daughter.
Jean-Joseph, Phillipe, and Maxence are all “strong” male characters with
far from exemplary behavior, while the laudable Joseph is quiet and
unassertive. Likewise, apart from the
priest’s deathbed counseling of Agathe bringing her to the realization that she
had been wronging her more virtuous son, the novel contains little to support
the notion that regeneration must come from the Church. Balzac, perhaps motivated by moralistic
critics of his work, claims with little basis that the most respectable values
underly his novel.
The theme of
greed displacing ethics is, however, in a general way, appropriate, as the
characters motivated by money or by money’s glow reflected in social prestige
are depicted as amoral while those with more humane motivations behave better. In the plot’s mainline clear patterns of
retributive justice govern the paths of Joseph, the character most positively
portrayed who finds success and even ennoblement in spite of his indifference
to such rewards and the avaricious Maxence, Phillipe, and Flore all of whom come to ruin. The final miseries of Flore read almost like
a medieval exemplum. Yet, though
she has no worldly ambition, Agathe is profoundly misguided in her treatment of
her sons., while the community in general is neither pious nor wicked, [2] though
often self-interested and gossipy.
This novel is only a small portion of
Balzac’s grand project, La Comédie humaine, comprising ninety-one completed
works and the planning for another forty-six over a period of two decades. Balzac’s
introductory note to the novel points out the thematic complexity allowed by
his comprehensive plan. His soldiers, he
says, in this story indicate the “depravity” that “results from the exigencies
of war in certain minds which dare to act in private life as they would on the
field of battle,” but the reader can see that this is no general verdict due to
the “fine characters,” motivated by “great and noble devotion” depicted in his Scenes
of Military Life.
The conflicted
focus implied by the multiple titles may, then, be an answer as well as a
question. As La Rabouilleuse is a
single mosaic stone in a large composition in which every portion need not
mimic the whole, the themes of one isolated portion need not agree with those
of another. Even the irreligious among
Balzac’s nineteenth or twenty-first century readers may echo Dryden’s cogent
praise of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales “Here is God's plenty.” A certain exhilarating liberty emerges,
allowing Balzac to compose without preconception.
Balzac’s approach
to theme, nuanced far beyond his conscious, expressed values, is evident in the
ambivalence of his political implications.
Though Balzac was himself a conservative royaloist, Marx and Engels had
the highest regard for his work. Marx had
enough respect for the Comédie humaine to
envision writing a major, full-length study of it, though he never completed
this project. Engels praised Balzac for
writing that belied the conscious reactionary theme, often betraying (to a
receptive reader at least) what looks quite like revolutionary
implications.
Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.
Engels to Margaret Harkness April 1888
The same
authorial freedom that allowed Marx and Engels to see their notions of French
society reflected in Balzac’s epic canvas also enables the reader without a partisan
view to see large and complex patterns in this narrative world which, like
those we observe in life, offer in general no easy answers and include many
shades between the extremes, even now and then to revealing the
unexpected.
The liberty that
enables ambiguity need not result in randomness. Balzac employs observations of unprogrammed lived
experience mixed with literary conventions, and he has no difficulty in
developing incidents that suggest generalizations that might be called
themes. Rather like some painters who
chose to work en plein air claiming to reproduce their sense impressions
on canvas, but in fact propelling art in new directions, Balzac’s pose as a scientifical
observer of society allowed him to construct fictions in a new vein.
La Rabouilleuse, a novel that has
met more blame than praised from critics, [2] has at any rate a gripping story,
punctuated with dramatic incident and scenes of pathos. The reader who hunts after a theme reducible
to a single line may be missing both that simple narrative excitement and the
grander sense, based on Balzac’s life’s work, that his novels provide access to
a complete and coherent scene of human life, one as subjective as individual as
any writer’s. The specific
correspondence to historical moments in France during the author’s life seems
almost immaterial, in spite of the references to documented events. In the end La Rabouilleuse and the
entire Comédie humaine are, not because of topical or documentary
detail, but by virtue of the specifically Balzacian imagination they record, as
resistant to reductive formulae and sometimes as enigmatic as life itself.
1. The passages quoted in Clara Bell’s rendering are in the
original French: “grands enseignements et pour la famille et pour la maternité; “des
effets produits par la diminution de la puissance paternelle;” “puisse une
société basée uniquement sur le pouvoir de l'argent;” and “puisse-t-elle
recourir promptement au catholicisme pour purifier les masses par le sentiment
religieux.” “Assez de beaux caractères,
assez de grands et nobles dévouements brilleront dans les Scènes de la Vie
militaire, pour qu’il m’ait été permis d’indiquer ici combien de dépravation
causent les nécessités de la guerre chez certains esprits, qui dans la vie
privée osent agir comme sur les champs de bataille.”
2. In his introduction to the entire Comédie
humaine, Balzac notes that in his view “Man is neither good nor bad” (“L’homme
n’est ni bon ni méchant”).
3. A number of
negative judgements are mentioned at the outset of Allan H. Pasco, “Process
Structure in Balzac's ‘La Rabouilleuse,’" Nineteenth-Century French
Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1/2 (Fall and Winter 2005-2006).
Note of an Accidental Bibliophile
Feeling I have
enough to do to attend to the authors’ words, I don’t seek out rare editions of
books, but now and then I happen across an interesting old title in a Salvation
Army or library book sale, and I am quite willing then to enjoy a volume’s particular
qualities. My English copy of La
Rabouilleuse, titled A Bachelor’s Establishment, was published by J.
M. Dent in 1896, translated by the indefatigable Clara Bell and introduced by
George Saintsbury, part of his twenty-volume edition of the Comédie Humaine. (The Times reviewer, grandly named E.
Irenaeus Stevenson, welcomed the set on June 25, 1898 in a piece “Balzac in
English” which began by noting that Balzac “is not even yet read and measured
nicely by all those men and women quick in perception [and] broad in cultivation.” “It may be doubted,” he goes on, “whether in
English translation and with Anglo-Saxons, Balzac will ever attain a much more
general circulation that his masterpieces today receive.”
The design of my
copy has charm in its art nouveau cover lettering and decoration, deckle
edges and irregular signatures, thick, palpable pages, and engraved
illustrations by the Scots painter and printmaker D. Murray Smith. While not memorable art, they and their
inlaid protective tissues grace the book.
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