The splendors and miseries of courtesans

Front matter

The splendors and miseries of courtesans 39090013777319

THE DEATH OF PEYRADE

Contenso?i, ivho appeared with his face cleansed from its black disgtdse, stood as though transformed into a bronze statue, when he heard Lydie say : '^Then you won't pardon me, father? It was not my faidt ! ”

Preface

In giving the title of The Human Comedy to a work in which I have been engaged for nearly thirteen years, I feel it necessary to give a brief explanation of its origin, scope and plan, and to attempt this as impartially as if it had no personal interest for me. This is not so difficult as the public may imagine. There are few works that contribute much to a man’s vanity, and much labor adds to his share of modesty. This observation accounts for the careful examination that Corneille, Moli^re and other great authors made of their own compositions, and if it is impossible for us to equal their lofty conceptions, we may at least strive to imitate them in this characteristic.

The first idea of The HUMAN COMEDY came to me like a dream, an impossible project which I welcomed and then allowed to escape; it was a charming fancy that showed its smiling face but for an instant, and spreading its wings fluttered back into a visionary heaven. Still, fancy often changes into fact and its tyrannical commands cannot be resisted.

The idea occurred to me, in consequence of a comparison between the human and animal kingdoms.

It would be a mistake to believe that the great

(iii)

IV dispute that has recently arisen between Cuvier and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire rests upon the ground of a scientific innovation; Unity of composition ^ expressed in other terms, occupied the greatest minds of the two preceding centuries. On reading over the extraordinary works of the mystical writers who have devoted themselves to the various sciences, considered under their relation to the infinite, such as Swedenborg, Saint Martin, etc., and the books of the greatest geniuses in natural history, such as Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., we find in the monads of Leibnitz, in the organic molecules of Buffon, in the vegetative force of Needham, in the perfect adjustment of similar parts of Charles Bonnet, who dared to write, in 1760, that an animal vegetates like a plant; in all these, I say, we find the rudiments of the great law of each for himself, upon which the unity of composition depends. There is but one single animal. The Creator has employed but one and the same model for all organic beings. It is the principle of animal life that each creature should borrow its external form, or, to speak more exactly, the differences of its form, from the environment in which it is destined to become developed. The zoological species result from these differences. The promulgation and maintenance of this system, that is moreover in harmony with our ideas of divine power, will do eternal honor to Geoffroy Saint-Millaire,

V who surpassed Cuvier on this high scientific ground, and whose triumph was acknowledged by the great Goethe in the last article which he wrote.

Far more deeply impressed by this system than by the discussions to which it has given rise, I saw, that, in this respect, society resembled nature. Does not society make of man, in accordance with the environment in which he lives and moves, as many different kinds of men as there are different zoological varieties? The differences between a soldier, an artisan, an administrator, a lawyer, an idler, a scholar, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor a poet, a pauper and a priest, though more difficult to understaad, are quite as considerable as those that distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the seal and the sheep. There have, therefore, existed, and will always exist, social species, just as there are zoological species. Since Buffon wrote his magnificent work, in which he attempted to include the whole of zoology in the compass of one book, was not there something of the same kind to accomplish in behalf of society? Between the different species of the animal kingdom, nature has set bounds which do not exist in human society. When Buffon described a lion, he needed but few additional words to draw the picture of a lioness; whereas, in society, a woman is not always the female of the male. In

VI one household there can exist two perfectly dissimilar beings. A shop-keeper’s wife is sometimes worthy of a prince, while a prince’s wife may not be the equal of a poor artist’s. The social state is subject to possibilities that are not to be found in nature, for it is nature plus society. The description of social species is, therefore, at least twice as complex as that of animal species, under the aspect of the two sexes alone. Lastly, there is no confusion in the life of animals, and few dramas take place among them; they merely pursue and attack one another. Men also pursue one another, but the greater or less degree of intelligence they possess renders the combat far more complicated. Though some men of science do not as yet admit that a great current of life overflows into humanity from the animal kingdom, it is certain that a grocer may become peer of France, and that a nobleman may sink into the lowest rank of society. Moreover, Buffon has described the life of animals as extremely simple. It needs but few accessories, and they have neither arts nor sciences; whereas man, in obedience to a still undiscovered law, tends to represent his manners, life and thought in all that he appropriates to his needs. Although Leuwenhoec, Swammerdam, Spallanzani, Reaumur, Charles Bonnet, Muller, Haller, and other patient zoographers have shown us how interesting the habits of animals are, yet, to our eyes

Vll at least, the ways of every animal appear to be the same at all periods; whereas the habits, dress, words and houses of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper are entirely dissimilar and change with each successive civilization.

Thus, the work to be written required a triple form: men, women and things — that is to say, human beings and the material representation they give to their mode of thought; in short, man and his life.

In reading the dry and repellant nomenclatures of facts that are called histones ^ who has not observed that the writers of all times and all countries, in Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome, have forgotten to give us an account of the customs of the people? The fragment of Petronius on the private life of the Romans does more to irritate than to satisfy our curiosity. The Abbe Barthelemy remarked this immense lacuna in the field of history, and devoted his life to reconstructing the manners of Greece in his Anacharsis.

But how could I hope to give interest to the drama of three or four thousand persons that a single society presents? How could I, at the same time, please the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who insist upon receiving their poetry and philosophy through the medium of striking images? I conceived the importance and the poetry of the history of the

Vlll human heart, but I saw no means of realizing my scheme; for, up to our own time, the most famous story-tellers had lavished their talents upon creating one or two typical characters, and painting one side of life. It was with this thought in mind that I read the works of Sir Walter Scott, the modern troubadour, who was at that time endowing with enormous charm a species of composition that has been unjustly called secondary. Is it not in reality more difficult to compete with nature in drawing such pictures as Daphnis and Chloe, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Gil Bias, Ossian, Julie d’Etanges, Uncle Toby, IVerther, Ren'e, Corinne, Adolphe, Paul and Virginia, Jeanie Deans, Claver^ house, Ivanhoe, Manfred and Mignon, than to marshal an array of facts that are much the same in all countries, to study the meaning of laws that have fallen into disuse, to draw up theories that bewilder nations, or, after the fashion of metaphysicians, to explain the nature of being? In the first place, almost all these characters, whose existence is longer and more real than that of the generations from the midst of which they spring, live only on condition of offering a faithful image of the present. Conceived in the vitals of their century, they are throbbing with the pulsations of the human heart, and often contain a whole system of philosophy.

IX

Sir Walter Scott, therefore, raised the novel to the philosophic value of history; the novel — the branch of literature that, through all the centuries, has incrusted with imperishable diamonds the poetic crown of those countries which have cultivated letters. He infused into it the true spirit of the ancients, combining within its limits drama, dialogue, description, and both portrait and landscape painting; he conferred upon it the two elements of an epic, the true and the marvelous, and gave it poetry in the familiar disguise of the humblest dialects. But as he had not invented a system, but had rather acquired his method in the heat of his inspiration and the logic of his work, it had not occurred to him to bind his stories each to each, so as to make them into one complete history, every chapter of which should be a novel, and every novel an epoch. On observing this want of connection, which, however, robs Sir Walter Scott of nothing of his greatness, I perceived at the same time the system best adapted to the execution of my work, and the possibility of executing it. Although I may say that I was dazzled by the astounding invention of Sir Walter Scott, who is always original, and never falls below his own level, I did not despair, for I discovered that the root of his talent lay in the infinite variety of human nature. Chance is the greatest romancer in the world, and a man has but to study it to be gifted

X with invention. French society was to be the historian, and I but the secretary. By taking an inventory of virtues and vices, by collecting signal examples of passion, and by painting from life, by making a selection from the chief social events of the time, and by composing types made up of traits taken from several homogeneous characters, I thought I might succeed in writing the history of human manners that has been forgotten by so many historians. Thus, by patience and perseverance,

I might be able to realize for France in the nineteenth century, the book we so much regret, that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia and India have not left us to tell us of their civilizations; the same work as that which, after the example of the Abbe Barthelemy, the brave and patient Monteil attempted, in a less attractive form, on the subject of the Middle Ages.

Still, all this was nothing. By confining himself to the most rigorous reproduction, a writer might be more or less faithful, more or less successful, patient or daring as a painter of human types; he might be the narrator of the dramas of private life, and the archeologist of social furnishings; he might catalogue the various professions and keep a record of good and evil; but to deserve the praise that every artist must be ambitious of receiving, was it not necessary for me to study the cause or causes

XI of social effect, and to apprehend the meaning hidden under this immense mass of figures, passions and events ? And after having sought, even if without success, the cause that is the motor of the whole social machine, was I not called upon to consider the principles of nature, and to discover wherein human society approaches the eternal law of beauty and truth, and wherein it strays from it. In spite of the extent of the premises which alone might constitute a work, a conclusion would still be required for the completion of my design. Thus described, society would itself bear witness to the cause of its own advance.

The law that makes a writer what he is, and, as I am not afraid to say, renders him the equal and perhaps the superior of the statesman, is the settled opinion he holds concerning human affairs, and his absolute devotion to fixed principles. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Kant, and Montesquieu provide the science which statesmen are to apply. ‘‘A writer should have decided belief in politics and morals, and should regard himself as a teacher of men; for men have no need of masters to learn how to doubt,^' said Bonald. I took these great words early for my guide; they are the law of the monarchical writer no less than of the democratic writer. Therefore, when people shall attempt to find me involved in contradictions, it will be discovered that xii PREFACE

they have misinterpreted some sarcasm of mine, or turned against me the speech of one of my characters, as slanderers are fond of doing. As to the inner meaning and soul of my work, I give its fundamental principles as follows:

Man is neither good nor evil, but is born with instincts and aptitudes; society, far from corrupting him, as Rousseau thought, improves him and makes him better, but self-interest develops his evil as well as his good inclinations. Christianity, and, above all, Catholicism, as I have said in the Country "Doctor, is a complete system for the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, and the greatest element of social order.

By studying attentively a picture of society, taken as it were from life, with all its good and all its evil, we learn the lesson that if thought, or passion, which includes both thought and feeling, is the social element, it is also the destructive element. In this, the life of society resembles the life of man, inasmuch as a race acquires longevity on condition of moderating its vital action. Instruction, or rather education by means of religious bodies, is consequently the great principle of a people’s existence, and the sole means of diminishing the sum of evil and augmenting the sum of good in every society. Thought, the origin of good and ill, can be qualified, ruled and directed

Xlll by religion alone. The only possible religion is Christianity. (See the letter written from Paris in Louis Lambert, in which the young transcendental philosopher explains, with reference to the doctrine of Swedenborg, that there has never been but one religion since the beginning of the world.) Christianity has created the modern nations, and will preserve them. From this the monarchical principle necessarily results. Catholicism and kingship are twin principles, but in regard to the limits within which they should be confined in order to restrain them from absolute development, it is plain that a preface as succinct as the present one, should not become a political treatise. Therefore I shall enter into neither the religious nor political dissensions of the moment. I am writing by the light of two eternal truths, religion and monarchy, which are proclaimed to be indispensable by contemporary events, and toward which every writer of good sense should endeavor to recall our country. Without being an enemy of the elective system, which I regard as an excellent constituent principle of law, I oppose it considered as the only social method; above all, when it is as ill-organized as it is to-day, for it does not even represent an imposing minority, the ideas and interests of which a monarchical government would be obliged to respect. The elective system, universally applied, leads to government

XIV by the masses, the only government that is irresponsible, and in which there are no bounds to tyranny, for it is called the law. For this reason 1 regard the family and not the individual as the true element of society, and in this respect, at the risk of being considered retrograde, I place myself beside Bossuet and Bonald, instead of allying myself to modern innovators. Since the elective system has become the only social method, if I have recourse to it myself, no contradiction must be inferred between my opinions and my acts. An engineer may announce that a bridge is on the point of breaking down, and that there is danger in crossing it, yet he goes over it himself when it is the only road he can take to town. Napoleon was marvelously successful in adapting the elective system to the genius of our country, and the least important deputies of the legislative body established by him made the most famous orators of the Chambers under the Restoration. No Chamber has been equal to the legislative body, if we compare the members of it separately. The elective system of the Empire was incontestably the better of the two.

This declaration will strike some persons as proud and pretentious; they will quarrel with a novelwriter for aspiring to be an historian, and will ask for an explanation of his scheme. My reply is that I am now fulfilling an obligation. The work I have

XV undertaken will have the length of a history, and I am bound to give a clear interpretation, hitherto unrevealed, of its principles and morals.

I am necessarily forced to suppress those prefaces published for the sake of replying to criticisms of an essentially transient nature, and will quote but one observation from them.

Those writers who have an aim, even if that aim be merely a return to such principles as are to be found in the past by reason of their eternal truth, are always expected to clear the ground. If a man carry a stone into the domain of ideas, if he call attention to an abuse, or if he set a mark on an evil in order to facilitate its removal, he must perforce be regarded as immoral. The reproach of immorality, which a courageous writer has never failed to receive, is moreover the last that remains to be addressed to a poet, when everything else has been said to him. If your pictures of life are true; if, by dint of toiling day and night, you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the world, the imputation of immorality will be cast in your face. Socrates was immoral, Jesus Christ was immoral, and both were persecuted in the name of the societies that they were endeavoring to overturn or to reform. When a man wants to annihilate anybody he taxes him with immorality. This trick, so familiar to rival factions, is the disgrace of those who employ

XVI it. Luther and Calvin knew well what they were doing when they injured material interests by using them as a buckler! So it is that their day is past.

By copying the whole of society and reproducing it in all its tumultuous agitation, it must inevitably result that a composition should exhibit more evil than good, and that part of the fresco should represent a group of guilty characters; but the critic immediately cries out on immorality without calling attention to the morality inculcated by another part of the picture, intended as a complete contrast to the first. As my general plan was unknown, however, I could the more readily forgive the criticism I received, especially as it is as impossible to prevent criticism from using its functions, as it would be to stop the workings of sight, speech and judgment. The time of impartiality has not yet come for me. Besides, the author who has not made up his mind to undergo the fire of criticism has no more call to write than a traveler has to set out upon his journey in expectation that the skies will be always clear. On this point I have still to observe that the most conscientious moralists are extremely doubtful whether society can show as many good as bad actions, but in the picture I have drawn of it there are more virtuous than reprehensible characters. I have made all errors, sins and crimes, from the most trifling to the most serious, meet with punishment.

PREFACE xvii

human or divine, secret or public. I have done better than the historian, for I am freer than he. Cromwell received no punishment in this world except that inflicted upon him in imagination. He is still the subject of discussion in one school after another. Bossuet himself treated the great regicide with deference. William of Orange, the usurper, and Hugh Capet, also a usurper, died full of days, without being troubled with more doubts and fears than Henri IV. or Charles I. An analysis of the lives of Catharine II. and Louis XIV. would prove them to be utterly destitute of moral principle were they judged from the standpoint of private morality; for, as Napoleon said, for kings and statesmen there is a small and a great code of morals. The Scenes of Political Life are based upon this interesting reflection. It is not the law of history to tend toward the ideal as the novel does. History is or should be what it was, whereas the noroel should be a nobler worlds as was said by Madame Necker, one of the most distinguished wits of the last century. But the novel would be of no value if the details of the august falsehood were not correct. Sir Walter Scott was obliged to conform to the ideas of a country that was essentially hypocritical, and his delineation of women was false, as compared with nature, because his models were schismatics. The Protestant woman has no ideal.

xviii PREFACE

She may be chaste, pure and virtuous, but she is reserved in her affections, which are always calm and disciplined as if she were fulfilling a duty. It would seem that the Virgin Mary had chilled the hearts of the sophists who banished her and her treasures of mercy from heaven. In Protestantism there is nothing further for a woman after her fall, but in the Catholic Church she is exalted by the hope of pardon. Consequently there is but one type of woman for the Protestant writer, whereas the Catholic finds a new woman in every new situation. If Sir Walter Scott had been a Catholic, and had set himself to the task of describing truly the different and successive stages of society in Scotland, perhaps he, who drew Etfie and Alice — the only characters that, in later life, he regretted having created, — might have admitted the passions, with all the sins and punishments they entail, and all the virtues that repentance teaches. Human nature is made up of passion, without which religion, history, romance, and art would be useless.

On seeing that I made a true picture of the many facts I had collected, some people have been so mistaken as to imagine me a votary of the Pantheistic school, with its two aspects of sensuality and materialism. But they may be, nay, must be, mistaken. I do not believe in the indefinite progress of society; I believe in the individual progress of

XIX man. Those who maintain that I consider man as a finite creature are strangely deceived. Seraphita^ that shows the workings of the doctrine of the Christian Buddha, seems to me to furnish a sufficient answer to this trifling accusation formerly advanced against me.

In some portions of my long work I have attempted to bring to popular notice the amazing facts, or, I might say, the marvels of electricity, that exerts so incalculable an effect upon man; but how should those cerebral and nervous phenomena, proving the existence of a new moral world, disturb the sure and certain relations between God and his worlds? How should the Catholic dogmas be shaken by them? If, by indisputable fact, thought is one day classed among those fluids which are known only through their effects, and the substance of which evades our senses, however intensified by mechanical contrivances, it will be the same thing as when Christopher Columbus observed that the earth was round, or when Galileo demonstrated that it moved upon its axis. Our future cannot be affected by it. Animal magnetism and its miracles, with which I have been familiar since 1820; the interesting researches of Gall, the successor of Lavater; and all those who, for the last fifty years, have been studying thought as the opticians have been studying light, that may be called akin to it, are

XX conclusive in favor of the mystics, who are the disciples of Saint John the Apostle, and in favor of the great thinkers who have established the spiritual world, in which the relations between man and God are revealed.

If the meaning of my composition be well understood, it will be acknowledged that I accord to indubitable facts of every-day life, whether secret or open, to the acts of individual existence, and to their origin and cause, the same importance that, up to this time, historians have attached to the public life of nations. The unknown struggle between Madame de Mortsauf and her passion, in a valley of the Indre, is perhaps as great as the most glorious of battles {The Lily of the yalley)^ for in the battle it is only the fame of a conqueror that is at stake, whereas, with Madame de Mortsauf it is heaven itself. The misfortunes of the Birotteaus, the priest and the maker of perfumes, seem to me the type of those of humanity. La Fosseuse {The Country Doctor) and Madame Graslin {The tillage Priest) are like all women. We all have the same troubles every day. I have had to do a hundred times what Richardson did only once. Lovelace has a thousand forms; for social corruption borrows the colors of the environment in which it is developed. On the other hand, Clarissa, that lovely picture of impassioned virtue, is drawn in lines of

XXI hopeless purity. A man must be a Raphael to draw many Virgins, and perhaps, in this respect, literature is beneath the level of painting. It may, therefore, be allowed me to draw attention to the many characters of irreproachable virtue in the published portions of my work: Pierrette Lorrain, Ursule Mirouet, Constance Birotteau, laFosseuse, Eugenie Grandet, Marguerite Claes, Pauline de Villenoix, Madame Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve Chardon, Mademoiselle d^Esgrignon, Madame Firmiani, Agathe Rouget, Renee de Maucombe; also many less important characters, who, though thrown into less conspicuous relief than those mentioned above, offer the reader the same example of domestic virtue. Do not Joseph Lebas, Genestas, Benassis, the priest Bonnet, the doctor Minoret, Pillerault, David Sechard, the two Birotteaus, the priest Chaperon, the judge Popinot, Bourgeat, the Sauviats, the Tascherons, and many others resolve the difficult literary problem of making a virtuous character interesting?

It was no trifling task to paint the two or three thousand salient figures of the age, for, after all, that is the number of types presented by every generation, and contained in The Human COMEDY. This multitude of figures, characters and existences required frames, and, if the expression may be forgiven me, galleries. Hence, as is known, I

XXll naturally divided my work into SCENES OF PRIVATE Life, Provincial Life, Parisian Life, Political Life, Military and Country Life. In these six books are classified all the STUDIES OF MANNERS AND MORALS that make up the general history of society, or, as our ancestors would have said, the collection of its deeds and exploits. The six books correspond, moreover, to general ideas. Each has its own sense and meaning, and formulates an epoch of human life. I shall now repeat briefly what was written after an inquiry into my plan by a young genius too early lost to the world of letters, Felix Davin: The SCENES OF PRIVATE LIFE represent childhood and youth with the failings peculiar to those two periods of life, and the SCENES OF Provincial Life represent the age of passion, calculation, self-interest and ambition. The SCENES OF Parisian Life give a picture of the tastes, vices and all the unbridled tendencies called into being by the customs peculiar to a great capital, in which the extremes of good and evil meet. Each of these three parts has its local color: the social antithesis of Paris and the provinces furnished me with immense resources. Not only men, but also the chief events of life are expressed by types. There are situations and typical phases represented in every existence, and I have tried to be especially exact in this branch of my subject. I have xxill attempted to give an idea of the different parts of my beautiful country. My book has its geography as well as its genealogy and its families, its places and its things, its people and its facts; as it has its heraldry, its nobles and its bourgeois, its artisans and its peasants, its politicians, its dandies, and its army — in fact, its own world.

After having portrayed social life in these three books, it still remained for me to describe the exceptional existences that resume the interests of some or all of those who are in any respect outside of the ordinary law of life; hence the SCENES OF Political Life. Having achieved this vast picture of society, was not I called to represent it also in a state of warfare, bursting its bounds either for defence or conquest.^* Therefore I wrote the SCENES OF Military Life, still the least complete portion of my work, but a place for which will be reserved in this edition, so that it may be included in it when it is finished. Finally, the SCENES OF COUNTRY Life are, so to speak, the evening of the long day, if the social drama may be so named. In this last book are to be found the purest characters, and the application of the great principles of order, wisdom and morality.