The cat and battledore, and other tales

Preface To The Comedie Humaine

In giving the title “‘Comédie Humaine” to a work begun nearly thirteen years ago, it is incumbent on me to set forth the leading idea of it, to account for its origin and briefly explain its plan; and to do this as if I had no personal interest at stake. This is not so difficult as the public may suppose. The production of a few works begets much vanity; the production of many, infinite modesty—an observation which accounts for the critical examination which Corneille, Moliére, and other great authors bestowed upon their own works. If I caunot rival their beautiful conceptions, I may at least be allowed to share their feelings upon this point. The fundamental idea of the “‘Comédie Humaine” was to me at starting, as it were a dream, one of those impracticable projects which we VOL. I. B caress for a moment, then suffer to escape on airy wings; a chimera which smiles, reveals its woman’s face, then straight upon a thought unfolds its pmions and mounts to some ideal heaven. But this chimera, like many a chimera, becomes metamorphosed into a reality; it commands, it tyrannizes, and we perforce submit.

The idea of which I am speaking arose from a comparison between man and the rest of the animal creation.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the great controversy which latterly arose between Cuvier and Geoffroi de St. Hilaire was based upon some scientific innovation. Uniformity of Structure had under other names engaged the attention of the master spirits of the two preceding centuries. On reperusing the very remarkable works of the mystic writers who have busied themselves about the sciences in their relations to the Infinite (such writers as Swedenborg, St. Martin, &c.), and the works of the most gifted students of natural history, such as Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, and others, we discover in the monads of Leibnitz, in the organic

PREFACE TO THE COMEDIE HUMAINE. 3 molecules of Buffon, in the vegetative force of Needham, im the adaptation of resembling parts of Charles Bonnet (who had the courage to write so far back as the year 1760, “animals vegetate like plants ’’), we discover, I say, the rudiments of the beautiful law of ‘‘each for itself” on which the doctrine of Unifornuty of Structure is based. There is but one animal. The Creator employed one and the same pattern for all organic beings. ‘The animal is a principle which derives its external form, or to speak more precisely, its divergent forms,. from the media in which it is called upon to develope itself. The species of zoology are the results of these differences. Tio have proclaimed and supported this system, a system which harmonizes with the ideas which we entertain of the divine power, will be the eternal honour of Geoffroi de St. Hilaire, who upon this high scientific question gained a victory over Cuvier—a victory hailed by the great Goethe in the last article which he wrote. Deeply imbued with this system, long ere the discussions which sprang out of it had arisen, I observed that in this respect social B 2 life resembled nature. Does not society mould the human being according to the sphere in which he is called upon to act into as many different sorts of men as there are varieties in zoology? ‘The differences which exist between the soldier, the artisan, the public functionary, the advocate, the man of independent means, the scientific man, the statesman, the merchant, the sailor, the poet, the beggar, the priest, are as considerable as, though more difficult to seize than, those which distinguish the lion, the ass, the raven, the shark, the seal, the sheep, &c., &e. Social species then, hke zoological species, always have existed and always will exist. Now, if Buffon has produced a magnificent work in attempting to embrace zoology in its totality in one volume, was it not possible to produce a work of the same kind in relation to society? But in regard to the varieties of animals, nature has prescribed certain limits which do not affect the body social. When Buffon had described the lion he dismissed the lioness in a few phrases ; whereas in the social world the wife is not always the female of the male.

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There may be two altogether dissimilar beings in one and the same household. The wife of a shopkeeper is sometimes fit to be the wife of a prince, and it often happens that the wife ofa prince is inferior to the wife of an artisan. The social state admits accidents which nature excludes— for society is nature, plus society. The description of the social species therefore, complicated by difference of sex only, was a task at least twice as great as the description of the species of animals. And finally, among animals there is but little dramatic action, little confusion; they attack each other and that is all. Men also attack each other, but the inequality between the intellectual powers of the combatants adds another complication to the combat. If some scientific men do not as yet admit that humanity is animality plus an immense torrent of vitality, it is certain that the grocer becomes a peer of France, while the nobleman sometimes sinks to the bottom of the socialscale. Then again, Buffon found that existence among animals is simple in the extreme. The animal has but very little furniture, arts and sciences it has none;

whereas man, in obedience to some undiscovered law, has a tendency to embody his habits, his ideas, and his existence in everything which he appropriates to his needs. Although Leuwenhoéc, Swammerdam, Spallanzani, Réaumur, Charles Bonnet, Muller, Haller, and other paimstaking zoographists have shown how interesting are the habits of animals, yet the habits of each animal are, to our eyes at least, constantly alike from age to age; whereas the habits, garments, language, and dwellings of the prince, the banker, the artist, the shopkeeper, the priest, and the pauper, are entirely different and change as civilization changes.

Thus the work to be undertaken was necessarily threefold. I had to deal with men, with women, and with things; that is to say, with persons and the material surroundings in which they clothe their ideas; in short with man and life.

Who, while reading the dry and repulsive cataloeues of facts which are called histories, who has failed to discern that writers of every age in Heypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome have forgotten to give us a history of manners and customs?

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The fragment of Petronius upon the private hfe of the Romans rather excites than gratifies our curiosity. Having noticed this immense gap in the field of history, the Abbé Barthélemy in the Anacharsis devoted his life to the reconstruction of the manners and customs of the Greeks.

But how was I to give interest to the drama, which a given society presents—a drama with three or four thousand characters? How please at once the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who love to have poetry and philosophy presented to them in striking forms? If I grasped the importance and the romance. of this history of the human heart, I did not percelve any means of executing my design ; for up to our time the most celebrated story-tellers had devoted all their talents to the creation of one or two typical personages ; to the depiction of one phase of life. It was under this impression that I read the works of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, that troubadour of modern times, was then giving an immense impetus to a kind of composition which has been unjustly dubbed secondary. Is it not in truth more difficult to compete with Daphnis and Chloé, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Gil Blas, Ossian, Julie D’Etanges, Uncle Toby, Werther, René, Corinne, Adolphe, Paul and Virginia, Jeannie Deans, Claverhouse, Ivanhoe, Manfred, and Mignon, than to arrange facts which are nearly the same in all nations, to search for the spirit of obsolete laws, to methodize theories which bewilder peoples, or, like certain metaphysicians, to explain that which is? In the first place, it almost invariably happens that such characters as I have enumerated (whose existence is more durable and more tangible than the generation amid which they are placed by their creators), owe their vitality to the fact that they are on a large scale an image of the present. Such characters, bred in the bowels of their epoch, form an envelope beneath which beats the great heart of humanity. A whole system of philosophy often lies hid beneath such characters. Walter Scott, then, conferred the philosophic value of history upon the novel—that field of

PREFACE TO THE COMEDIE HUMAINE. 9 literature which from age to age yields imperishable diamonds to encrust the poetic crown of those lands which foster letters. Scott infused into his novels the spirit of the past; blended in them action and dialogue, portrait, landscape, and description; he introduced into them the marvellous and the true, those elements of the age which he depicts ; and on his page the language of poetry is found side by side with the homeliest dialects. But Scott having discovered his method in the heat of his labour, or through the logic of his labour, rather than preconceived a system, it did not occur to him to unite his compositions one to another, so as to co-ordinate a complete history, each chapter of which would have been a romance, and each romance an epoch. Observing this absence of combination, which, however, does not diminish the ereatness of our Scotsman, I at once perceived the system which was favourable to the execution of my work and the possinility of executing it. Although I was dazzled, so to speak, by the astonishing fecundity of Walter Scott, ever equal and ever original, I did not despair; for I discovered the source of this gift in the infinite variety of human nature. Chance is the greatest novelist in the world; he who would be fertile has but to study. French society was to be the historian ; I was to be only its secretary. By making an inventory of vices and virtues; by collecting the principal actions of the passions, by the painting of character, by selecting the chief social events, and by composing types through the combination of several homogeneous characters, it occurred to me that I might possibly accomplish the writing of that history which so many historians have ignored—the history of manners and customs. By dint of great patience and courage I might realize for nineteenth-century France that volume which to our universal regret Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India, have failed to bequeath to us, touching their respective civilizations—a volume which the brave and patient Monteil, following in the footsteps of the Abbé Barthélemy, attempted, though in an unattractive form, on behalf of the Middle Ages.

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But such a work would still be a mere trifle. A writer, confining himself rigorously to a mere reproduction of society, might prove himself a painter, more or less faithful, more or less fortunate, patient and courageous, of types of humanity; a narrator of dramas of private life, an archeologist of the furniture of society, anomenclator of the professions, a registrar of good and of evil. But in order to earn that praise to which every artist should aspire, was I not bound to study the cause or causes of these social effects, to seize the meaning that underlay this vast assemblage of persons, passions, and events? Lastly, after having sought (I don’t say discovered) this cause, this social lever, was I not bound to meditate on natural principles and observe in what respects societies depart from or approximate to the eternal rule of the true and the beautiful? In spite of the extent of the premises, which premises alone would form a work, my work, to be complete, required a conclusion. Thus depicted, society should carry with it the reason of its movement.

The distinguishing characteristic of the author, that which makes him an author, which renders him the peer if not the superior of the statesman, is a definite conclusion about buman affairs, an absolute devotion to certain principles. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Kant, Montesquieu ave the science which statesmen apply. ‘‘An author,’ said Bonald, “ought to have fixed opinions in morals and politics; he should look upon himself as an instructor of men, for men don’t want masters to teach them to doubt.” I took betimes those grand words as my guide; they are the code of the monarchical writer. Accordingly when it is attempted to make me contradict myself, it will be found that some ironical expression has been misinterpreted ; or perchance that by a manceuvre familar to calumniators, an expression of one of my characters has been improperly turned against myself. As for the hidden meaning—the soul of this work—the principles on which it rests are these :—

Man is neither good nor bad, he is born with certain instincts and aptitudes. Social intercourse, far from degrading him,

PREFACE TO THE COMEDIE HUMAINE. 13 as Rousseau has contended, tends to perfect man and improve him; but private interest developes his evil proclivities also. Christianity, Catholicism especially, being, as I have said in the Médecin de Campagne, a complete system for the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the greatest element of social order.

From an attentive study of the picture of society, drawn, so to speak, from life, with all its good and all its evil, we derive this lesson, that if thought or passion, which embraces both thought and feeling, is the social element; it is also the destructive social element. In this respect social life resembles natural life. It is only by moderating the social activity of a people that we can ensure its longevity. Instruction, then, or rather education by religious bodies, is the grand principle of existence for nations, the sole means of diminishing the sum of evil and augmenting the sum of bliss in every society. Thought, that principle of good and evil, can be prepared, restrained, directed only by religion. The only religion possible is Christianity. (See the letter written from Paris in Louis Lambert, a letter in which the youthful mystic philosopher explains in relation to the Swedenborgian doctrine, how there has been but one religion from the beginning of the world.) Christianity has created and will preserve the peoples of modern times. Hence, doubtless, the necessity of the monarchic principle. Catholicism and monarchy are two twin principles. As to the lmits within which these two principles: should be confined by institutions, in order that they may not become absolutely paramount, every one will understand that a preface so succinct as this needs must be, cannot be made a political treatise. Thus I am precluded from entering upon the religious and political discussions of the day. I write by the hght of two eternal truths— religion and monarchy, two necessities, shown to be such by contemporary events, necessities to which every writer endowed with good sense should endeavour to reconduct his country. I am no enemy of the representative system; it is an excellent principle, on which to base the laws, but I reject it when put forward as the only social means, and especially in its pre-

PREFACE TO THE COMEDIE HUMAINE. 15 sent badly organized condition; for it fails to represent imposing minorities whose ideas and interests it is the duty of a monarchical government to consider. The representative system universally extended hands us over to the rule of the masses, the only rule which is irresponsible, the only rule whose tyranny is boundless, for it 1s called the law. I must add that I look upon the family, not the individual, as the real social unit. In this respect, at the risk of being deemed a retrograde intellect, I take my stand with Bossuet and Bonald, instead of joining recent innovators.

Since the representative system has become the only social means, it must not be inferred, should I resort to it myself, that there is the least divergence between my opinions and my actions. An engineer announces that a certain bridge.is on the point of giving way, that it is perilous for any one to make use of it, yet uses it himself when it forms the only route by which he can reach the town. Napoleon had wonderfully adapted the representative system to the genius of our country; and accordingly the most insignificant deputies of his Legislative Body were the most celebrated orators of the Chambers under the Restoration. No Chamber has equalled the Legislative Body, if we take them man for man. The imperial elective system is therefore incontestably the best.

Certain persons may discover something arrogant and presumptuous in this manifesto. The novelist will be attacked for wishing to be a historian, and will be asked to explain his politics. In saying what I have said, I fulfilled an obligation. That is my only answer. The task which I have undertaken will be as long as a history. I was bound to set forth its rationale, hitherto unknown, its principles and its morality.

Compelled as I have been to suppress prefaces published in answer to criticism essentially fugitive—I desire to retain only one observation.

Writers who have in view an object, be it only a return to principles, which, from the mere fact of their being eternal, are to be met with in the past, must always

PREFACE TO THE COMEDIE HUMAINE. 17 begin by clearing the ground. Now, whoever carries his stone into the domain of ideas, whoever points out an abuse, whoever places a stigma upon that which is bad, with a view to its abolition, is always looked upon as immoral. The reproach of immorality, which the courageous writer has never escaped, is moreover the last that remains to be made when nothing else can be objected to a poet. If your pictures are true, if, by dint of diurnal and nocturnal toil, you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the world, the word immorality is flung in your face. Socrates was immoral, Jesus Christ was immoral. Both were prosecuted in the name of the societies which they overturned or reformed. When you wish to kill any one, tax him with immorality. This, the familiar device of partisans, is the disgrace of all who have recourse to it. Luther and Calvin knew well what they were about when they availed themselves of injured material interests as a shield, and so they lived to the term of their natural lives. It happened, and must necessarily have happened, that in copying a whole VOL. I. © society, embracing the vast field of its various activities, some particular composition exhibited more evil than good, some particular portion of the fresco displayed a group of culprits. Thereupon the critics set up the yell of immorality, without pointing out some other part which was intended to form a complete contrast. Since the critics were ignorant of the general scheme, I forgave them; and I forgave them all the more readily, because it is quite as impossible to stop criticism as it is to prevent the eye, the tongue, and _ the judgment from performing their functions. Besides, the era of impartiality has not yet arrived for me, and moreover an author who cannot make up his mind to stand the fire of criticism, should no more sit down to write than a traveller should set forth upon a journey trusting to a continuance of fine weather. Upon this question of morality it remains for me to pot out that the most conscientious moralists doubt whether society exhibits as many good as evil actions, and that in my picture of it will be found a greater number of virtuous than of blameworthy

PREFACE TO THE COMEDIE HUMAINE. 19 characters. In my pages, unworthy actions, faults, crimes, from the lightest to the gravest, meet with their retribution, human or divine, open or concealed. I have done better than the historian; for I am less fettered. Cromwell incurred no other chastisement on earth, than that inflicted on him by the thinker. Even up till now the question has been discussed between the different schools. Bossuet himself spared the illustrious regicide. William of Orange the ursurper, Hugh Capet, that other usurper, die full of days without having any more distrust or fear than Henry the Fourth and Charles the First. The life of Catherine the Second and that of Frederick of Prussia, would point to the conclusion that there is no such thing as morality, when they are judged either by the moral code which governs private persons, or that which rules crowned heads—for there is, as Napoleon has said, for kings and statesmen, a minor and amajor code of morals. My scenes of political life are based upon that fine reflection. It is not the essence of history, as itis of the novel, to aim at the beau ideal. History is or ought to be that 0 2 which has happened, while, according to Madame Necker, one of the most distinguished spirits of the last century, ‘ the romance should be the better world.” But the romance would be nothing if the august falsehood were not true in its details. Walter Scott, being compelled to conform to the notions of a country essentially hypocritical, was false relatively to human nature at large in his portraiture of woman, because his models were schismatics. The Protestant woman has no ideal. She may be chaste, pure, virtuous, but her unexpansive love will always be calm and subdued, lke an accomplished duty. It would seem that the Virgin Mary has chilled the hearts of the sophists who banished her from Heaven with her treasures of mercy. In the Protestant scheme the fallen woman has no_possibilities, whereas in the Catholic Church the hope of pardon renders her sublime. Accordingly for the Protestant writer there is but one woman, while the Catholic writer discovers in each fresh situation a fresh one. Had Walter Scott been a Catholic ; had he set himself the task of truthfully delineating the various societies which

PREFACE TO THE COMEDIE HUMAINE. 21 succeeded each other in Scotland, it is possible that the portrayer of Effie and of Alice (the two characters whom, in his old age, he reproached himself for delineating) would have recognized the passions with their errors and their chastisements, and the virtues which penitence points out to them. Passion is human nature in its entirety; without passion, religion, history, romance, and art would be useless. Seeing me pile up so many facts, and describe them as they are, with passion for their element some persons have imagined, most erroneously, that I belonged to the school of sensualism and materialism, two aspects of the same fact, namely, pantheism. But perhaps it was natural, nay, necessary, that they should make this mistake. I do not share the belief in the indefinite progress of society. I believe in the improvement of the individual man. Those, then, who would discern in me any intention to regard man as a finite creature are strangely mistaken. Seraphita, the doctrine (in action) of the Christian Buddha, seems to me to be a sufficient answer to this accusation, which has been very lightly brought against me.

M9 BALZAC.

In certain fragments of this long work, I have tried to popularize the astounding facts (I may say prodigies) of electricity, which in the human subject becomes converted into an incalculable force; but how can the phenomena of brain and nerve, which prove the existence of a new moral world, disturb the certain and necessary relations between the worlds and God? How will the dogmas of the Catholic faith be shaken by these phenomena? If by dint of incontestable facts, thought is some day classed among the fluids which are revealed only through their effects, and whose substance escapes our senses, even fortified as they are by so many mechanical apphances, it will be with this discovery, as it was with the sphericity of the earth observed by Christopher Columbus, and its rotation proved by Galileo. Our future will remain the same. Animal magnetism, with whose miracles I have been familiar since 1820; the beautiful researches of Gall, the successor of Lavater; all those who, during the last fifty years, have devoted their labours to thought, as opticians have devoted theirs to Light

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(Thought and Light being closely akin) support the mystics, those disciples of the apostle St. John, and the great thinkers who haye proved the existence of the spiritual world, that sphere wherein the relations betwixt man and God are laid bare. Those who thoroughly grasp the meaning of this work will discover that I attribute as much importance to constant everyday facts (secret or patent),—to the actions of the individual life, to their causes and their principles, as historians have hitherto accorded to the events of the public life of nations. The secret combat which takes place between Madame de Mortsauf and her passion, in a valley of the Indre, is perhaps as grand as the most celebrated of recorded battles (see the Lily in the Valley). In the latter the glory of some conqueror is at stake, in the other the stake is Heaven. The misfortunes of Birotteau the priest, and Birotteau_ the perfumer, are, to my mind, the sufferings of humanity. La Fosseuse (in the Country Doctor) and Madame Graslin in the Village Parson, are woman in her entirety well-nigh. ’Tis thus we suffer day by day.

I have been called upon to do a hundred times that which Richardson did but once. Lovelace has a thousand shapes; for social depravity assumes the hues of all the surroundings amid which it is developed. On the other hand, Clarissa, that beautiful image of impassioned virtue, is depicted in lines whose purity fills one with despair. To produce many Madonnas one must be a Raphael. In this respect literature is perhaps inferior to painting. And here I may perhaps be permitted to point out how many spotless characters: are to be found in the published portions of this work. There are Pierrette Lorraine, Ursule Mirouét, Constance Birotteau, La Fosseuse, Hugénie Grandet, Marguerite Claés, Pauline de Villenoix, Madame Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve Chardon, Mademoiselle d’Esegrignon, Madame Firmiani, Agatha Rouget, Renée de Maucombe, and many secondary characters which, though they don’t stand out in such bold relief, do, none the less, present to the reader an example of the practice of the domestic virtues. Do not Joseph Lebas, Genestas, Benassis, Parson Bonnet, Doctor