Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Hobbies)

“A man who has no hobby does not know all the good to be got out of life. A hobby is the happy medium between a passion and a monomania.”— French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), “La Grande Breteche,” in Scenes From Private Life (1830)

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Hatred, ‘A Vice of Narrow Souls’)

“Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny.”—French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), The Muse of the Department (1843)

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Happy People)

“Some day you will find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own.”— French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), Père Goriot (1834)

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Confiding in Inferiors)

“As a general rule, confidences are made to persons below one socially rather than to those above. Much more readily than we can employ our superiors in secret affairs, we make use of our inferiors, who consequently become committed sharers in our most hidden thoughts; they are present at our deliberations.” ― French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), Cousin Bette (1846)

As this passage indicates, Honore de Balzac had in mind social inferiors as the recipients of confidences. In a number of his novels, such as The Bureaucrats, he was sharp enough to realize that professional inferiors could also be aware of secrets.

Because legal equality of the sexes was decades away from becoming a reality, Balzac could not imagine a world where professional inferiors could be women—ones who could turn against a high-ranking businessman, say, or, better yet, a high-ranking businessman who goes on to lead a country.

Balzac was psychologically acute enough, however, to grasp why women, in any setting, could want to bring down those who unknowingly slight them. He demonstrated that insight repeatedly in his classic Cousin Bette, his story of a spinster “poor relation” who uses a lifetime of secrets bestowed unthinkingly by her aristocratic cousins to weave an inextricable web of revenge against them all.

(The image accompanying this post shows Jessica Lange as the title protagonist in the 1998 film adaptation of the novel.)

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on How a Parisian Vamp Can Torment a Powerful Man)

“Valerie [Marneffe] wished to be found in an atmosphere of sweetness, to attract the chief and to please him enough to have a right to be cruel; to tantalize him as a child would, with all the tricks of fashionable tactics. She had gauged [Baron Hector] Hulot. Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.” ― French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), Cousin Bette (1846)

One hundred and seventy-five years ago this month, Honore de Balzac—one of the most astonishingly prolific novelists of all time—set to work on not one, but two novels of “poor relations”: Cousin Pons and Cousin Bette. The latter is probably the better known of the two, as it was adapted for television (first airing 50 years ago this August, as a miniseries in the Masterpiece Theatre franchise), with Margaret Tyzack in the title role, and a less faithful and less accomplished 1998 film starring Jessica Lange.

The image accompanying this post comes from the miniseries, with Helen Mirren, still early in her long, distinguished career, as Valerie, the beautiful, greedy wife of a War Office clerk. (Elisabeth Shue played a courtesan, based on this character but inexplicably renamed, in the movie.) Bette, a poor, aging spinster, uses her young friend to wreak vengeance on rich relatives, the Hulots, for unknowingly depriving her of the young artist she has come to love.  

Seldom has literature seen an irredeemable roue undone by his own folly like Baron Hulot (played in the miniseries by Thorley Walters, who appears in this photo with Dame Mirren). Bad enough that this department head in the War Office squanders money on a mistress at the start of the novel, or that he (like three other men, simultaneously) is seduced by Valerie.

But, even when he pays dearly for that most recent dangerous liaison, Hulot is so incorrigible in his lust that he begs his saintly wife to allow him to bring home another, younger (15 years old) mistress. The result: disgrace and financial ruin for his family.

With penetrating insight into the male psyche, Balzac demonstrates a lesson as applicable in 21^st century Washington, London, Berlin—and, I suspect, even Moscow—as it was in 19^th-century Paris: a middle-aged high government official or businessman, no matter how much money or influence he wields, is a mere toy in the hands of a wily, pretty young thing.

As rich in irony as it is relentless in pessimism, Cousin Bette is a masterpiece of 19^th-century literary realism.

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on the Conversational Charms of a Parisian Salon)

“Ingenious repartee, subtle observations, sparkling gibes, pictures painted with brilliant clarity came thick and fast in a spontaneous, effervescent rush, offered up without arrogance or artifice, spoken with sincerity, and savored with delight. Above all, the guests shone by their refinement and their inventiveness, which were nothing short of artistic. You will find elegant manners elsewhere in Europe—you will find cordiality, bonhomie, sophistication—but only in Paris, in this salon, and in those of whom I’ve just spoken, does there flourish the special wit that gives all these social virtues a pleasing, multifaceted unity, a sort of fluvial momentum by which that profusion of musings, aphorisms, tales, and pages from history wend their way in an easy and untrammeled flow. Paris alone, the capital of taste, possesses the secret that makes of conversation a joust, in which every temperament is encapsulated in a quip, in which each has his say, all his experience condensed in a word, in which all find amusement, refreshment, and exercise. And only there, too, will you truly exchange your ideas; there you will not, like the dolphin in the fable, carry a monkey on your shoulders; there you will be understood, with no danger of wagering gold against pot metal. Secrets artfully betrayed, exchanges both light and deep, everything undulates, spins, changes luster and color with each passing sentence. Keen judgments and breathless narrations follow one upon the next. Every eye listens, every gesture is a question, every glance an answer…. Never did the phenomenon of speech, to which, when carefully studied and skillfully wielded, an actor or storyteller owes his glory, cast so overpowering a spell on me….But if these things are told with all their candor intact, all their natural forthrightness, all their illusory aimlessness, perhaps you will fully grasp the charm of a true French party, captured at the moment when the sweetest companionship makes everyone forget his own interests, his exclusive self-love, or, if you like, his pretensions.”—French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), “Another Study of Womankind” (1842, translated by Jordan Stump) in The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (2014)

This Day in Art History (Birth of Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic Rebel)

Apr. 26, 1798— Eugène Delacroix, a French Romantic painter who moved his country in a different artistic direction through works abounding in exotic, extravagant color, was born Charenton (Saint-Maurice), Val de Marne departement, in the Ile de France region near Paris. 

Instability marked the painter’s youth and early manhood. In short order, France experienced Napoleon Bonaparte, at his zenith, in defeat and exile; the overthrow of the revived Bourbon monarchy; and the acquisitive desires of a bourgeoisie unleashed after the French Revolution and a quarter-century of war with the rest of Europe. 

The fortunes of his family mirrored the national unrest. It was widely believed that his father, Charles Delacroix, was infertile, and that his real male parent was Talleyrand, successor to Charles as minister of foreign affairs. With his debt-ridden father dying when Eugene was seven, his mother following nine years later, and Eugene himself suffering from various medical conditions that would plague him for years, it was no wonder that the boy grew up solitary and intense.

Make that solitary, intense and independent. Though excelling in his studies of the classics and drawing at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, he left to pursue painting. A short stint with the influential painter Pierre-Narcisse Guerin likewise left little impression.

Widespread notice—bur hardly the approval of the French artistic establishment—came to him in his twenties with two paintings that caused scandals: The Massacre at Chios (1824), which alluded to the repressive Bourbon restoration, and The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which depicted a decadent Assyrian king ordering the murder of his servants, concubines and animals. 

Anti-monarchical sentiment also informed what might be Delacroix’s most famous painting, Liberty Leading the People (1830), in which the Goddess of Liberty, triumphantly holding aloft France’s national flag, leads a vanguard of French citizens moving forward, even as soldiers lying dead in the foreground demonstrate the tumult and cost of freedom. 

Before long, an alternative source of non-French, non-classical subject matter began to appeal to Delacroix. Unlike prior French artists, who traveled to Italy for their models, he went in another direction, toward Morocco, where he found an atmosphere that spurred his interest in sensual environments. (He met with less success in convincing women of this region to pose for him, because of traditional Moslem strictures mandating that women be covered.)

A contemporary of Honore de Balzac, the painter gave the novelist through his work an example of how to use color in the short novel La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl With the Golden Eyes) that formed the final portion of The History of the Thirteen. Yet, while Balzac acknowledged the debt by dedicating the novella to him, Delacroix did not reciprocate the affection, at times scathingly criticizing him.

“I dislike rational painting,” Delacroix once observed—and, indeed, intense emotion burst beyond the frames of his paintings. It wasn’t only in his sensational, even melodramatic, subject matter (e.g., massacres), but also in the bold brush strokes that anticipated Van Gogh and Gaugain.

Because much of  Delacroix’s work—particularly in the latter part of his career—consisted of public art, a visit to France is still the best way to view much of his work. But New Yorkers will soon get to experience firsthand a large portion of it, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts an exhibit of 180 of his works that had been first on display at the Musee du Louvre. The exhibit will run at the Met from September 17, 2018 to January 6, 2019. 

There, we should understand anew what Delacroix meant by “The great artist roams his own domain, and there he offers you a feast to his own taste.”

(The image accompanying this post is Delacroix's self-portrait, painted in 1837.)

Quote of the Day (V.S. Pritchett, on Balzac, ‘Novelist of Our Appetites’)

“Balzac is the novelist of our appetites, obsessions and our idees fixes, but his great gift—it seems to me—is his sense of the complexity of the human situation. He had both perceptions, one supposes, from his peasant origins, for among peasants, he was fond of saying, the idée fixe is easily started; and their sense of circumstance overpowers all other considerations in their lives. A character in Balzac is so variously situated in history, in money, in family, class and in his type to begin with; but on top of this Balzac's genius was richly inventive in the field least exploited by the mass of novelists: the field of probability. It is very hard to invent probabilities. This simply means that Balzac knew his people as few novelists ever know their characters.”—V.S. Pritchett, “Honore de Balzac,” in The Pritchett Century: A Selection of the Best, selected by Oliver Pritchett (1997)

Like Theodore Roosevelt, Honoré de Balzac--born on this day in Tours, France, in 1799—was turbocharged by epic amounts of coffee consumed through the day. But, while the American devoted much of the “strenuous life” he advocated into the outdoors, the Frenchman spent much of his indoors—wooing women, hatching foolhardy get-rich-quick schemes, dodging creditors.

Oh, yes—and creating an astonishing body of fictional work. In our time, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates have been acclaimed (or damned) for being prolific. But even with the two extra decades of life that each enjoyed, Balzac still probably has them both beat. With 93 novels and stories in his opus, Comédie humaine, he is an inspiration for those of us with a rage to write—and a standing rebuke concerning why we don’t match that output.

Pritchett, a fiction writer of no small gifts himself, is very shrewd in noting that Balzac was not a mere documentarian of social customs of his time, but someone who understood his characters’ compulsions because he shared them in abundance. Two writers who stand far apart in time and sensibility, Henry James and Tom Wolfe, have claimed him as a literary forbear. 

His work teems partly because he tries to account for all levels of a French urban society bursting at the seams with new-found wealth and ambition. In novels such as Pere Goriot, Cousin Bette, Cousin Pons, Eugenie Grandet and The Bureaucrats, he depicted with exactingly painful personal knowledge the romantic striving for all that wealth and status can provide—and the often ugly means and ends to which his characters reduced themselves to achieve it.

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on ‘Courage and Work’)

"I tell you, my friend, all happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy, and above all, with illusions, I pulled through them all. That is why I still hope, and hope much."--Honore de Balzac, letter to friend Laurent-Jan, December 10, 1849, in The Works of Honore de Balzac, Volume 20, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley (1899)