When I decided to take part in the Christmas Humbook event, organised by Emma and Guy, it seemed a fairly easy thing to commit to. Reading three books over the following year, two chosen by a fellow blogger, one by the host - no worries, right? Except that nine months on, I had yet to try one...
Time to get cracking then, and today sees me review one of those three books, the one Emma and Guy chose for me. Unfortunately though, even this isn't quite as straightforward as it should be. You see, they chose a classic by Honoré de Balzac, Eugenie Grandet - but I decided to go for something else instead (I had my reasons...)
*****
Le Colonel Chabert (Colonel Chabert) is a novella which takes place in and around Paris, just after the Napoleonic wars. The story starts with banter in a lawyer's office where some clerks are making fun of an old man waiting to see their employer. Once they deign to talk to the man, the fun continues - until they happen to ask his name:
"Monsieur, lui dit Boucard, voulez-vous avoir la complaisance de nous donner votre nom, afin que le patron sache si...
- Chabert.
-Est-ce le colonel mort à Eylau? demanda Hulé qui n'yant encore rien dit était jaloux d'ajouter une raillerie à toutes les autres.
- Lui-même, monsieur," répondit le bonhomme avec une simplicité antique. Et il se retira.
"Sir," said Boucard, "would you be so kind as to give us your name, so that our employer might know whether..."
"Chabert."
"Isn't that the colonel who died at Eylau?" asked Hulé who, not having said anything to that point, was keen to add a barb to all the others.
"The very same, sir," the old man replied with old-fashioned simplicity. And he left.***
As surprised as the clerks are by the mysterious stranger's answer to their question, that is nothing compared to what their boss, Monsieur Derville, feels when he hears the full story. The truth of the matter is that somehow, miraculously, the famous colonel, long thought dead in battle, has managed to survive and has returned to reclaim his life, his riches and his wife. Now, if only his wife can be made to comply...
I decided to try Le Colonel Chabert after seeing it mentioned in some books I read this year. It comes up a couple of times in Sebald's Austerlitz, but it actually forms a vital component of Javier Marías' most recent novel, The Infatuations, another story about secrets from beyond the grave. In his novel, Marías poses the question as to whether a woman who has lost her husband would really want him to return from the grave after a long absence, and this question forms the whole basis of Balzac's story.
The physical description of Chabert at his first meeting with his lawyer is a telling one. He literally looks like a corpse - and it's little wonder considering the ordeals he's gone through. He's a man who has been buried alive, only to escape from the earth as naked as the day he was born. It's a twisted kind of rebirth:
"Mais, avec une rage que vous devez concevoir, je me mis à travailler les cadavres qui me séparaient de la couche de terre sans doute jetée sur nous, je dis nous, comme s'il y eut eu des vivants! J'y allais ferme, monsieur, car moi aussi! Mais je ne sais pas aujourd'hui comment j'ai pu parvenir à percer la couverture de chair qui mettait une barrière entre la vie et moi."
"But, with a rage that you can imagine, I set to work on the cadavers which separated me from the layer of earth which had undoubtedly been thrown upon us, I say us, as if there was anyone alive down there! I put my back into it, sir, for I was alive too! But today I couldn't tell you how I managed to break through the covering of flesh which formed a barrier between life and me."
It's a tall tale though - who could ever believe him?
Certainly not his wife... She has benefited financially from his death and is now married once more, with two young children at home. Having risen in the world thanks to her new husband, she is terrified of losing him (and her station) - which is actually quite possible, as he suspects that her humble origins are beginning to hold him back. In short, she is willing to do anything to stop the poor war hero from being recognised as a living, breathing soul.
There are also political complications to Chabert's quest to have his existence recognised. While the colonel was a favourite of the Emperor, times have changed, and far from being welcome, his return from the grave would probably be little more than an inconvenience. He is a throw-back to the old Napoleonic era, with its ethics and old-fashioned honour code, and the writer makes it clear that very different values rule now. The restoration has brought about an age of commercialism, where getting ahead at any cost is more important than moral niceties.
A further problem is the financial reality of the old soldier's predicament. To regain his position and fortune, he will need to go through the courts - but how can you prove a point in law without status or money? In short, Chabert is a man in a void, a creature that others would rather see vanish:
"J'ai été enterré sous
des morts, mais maintenant je suis enterré sous des vivants, sous des
actes, sous des faits, sous la société tout entière, qui veut me faire
rentrer sous terre!"
"I was buried beneath the dead, but now I am buried beneath the living, beneath files, beneath facts, beneath all of society, which would have me six feet under again!"
I challenge the reader not to feel sympathy with his plight...
Le Colonel Chabert is more like a play than a novella; its long, conversation-dominated scenes seem perfect for the stage, and with the exception of the final part, the story mostly keeps to the unities of time, place and plot (well, loosely, anyway!). Occasionally, though, Balzac does escape into prose and waxes lyrical, particularly in describing certain aspects of the novel. Chief among these are the spectral appearance Chabert makes at Derville's chambers, the vivid escape the colonel makes from the grave, and a detailed look at the rundown house where he lodges (a passage which brings back memories of the minutely-detailed start to Le Père Goriot).
It's not giving too much away to hint that things don't end as the reader would like them to, but Le Colonel Chabert is much more than a sad story of a poor soul betrayed by an ungrateful loved one (it's no coincidence that Derville also represented Old Goriot in the previous novel). A horror story, then? Yes, but as Derville himself points out, no novelistic creation could ever match up to the terrors of reality. Poor Chabert is doomed to unhappiness from the moment he claws his way through the soil separating the land of the living from the realm of the dead:
- Les morts ont donc bien tort de revenir?
"So the dead are wrong to want to come back to life?"
Unfortunately, the answer Balzac (and Marías) would reluctantly give is yes...
*****
*** All translations into English are my own, misguided, attempts (with one kind correction, courtesy of Richard McCarthy, AKA @Barsacq)
Once upon a time, a long time ago now, I posted on the perils of reading in a foreign language, and I'd like to revisit that theme to start today's post. That time, I was reading a book in German, the foreign language I'm most proficient in, but last week I finally got around to reading Balzac's classic novel, Le Père Goriot (Old Goriot), in the original French. In hindsight, starting the book on a packed commuter train on a weary Monday morning was probably not the most intelligent way to ease into it, but then, if I'd been able to think clearly, it wouldn't have been a Monday morning...
Imagine then, if you will, Tony seated on the 7.37, i-Pod connected, book open, ploughing through the first, incredibly detailed and descriptive, section of the book, when a couple of loud and annoying university students decided to have a conversation about their Japanese homework, proceeding to get their books out and decide to do it together, there and then. As the desperate duo slowly worked their way through their ten sentences of translation, their feeble attempts at correctly using post-positional particles becoming ever more laughable and grating, I desperately tried to take in Balzac's minute portrayal of a house in the Parisian suburbs, first outside, then inside, upstairs and down. And then I started banging my head against the window.
*****
That this post is here for you to read shows you that I did (eventually) overcome that false start, and I'm very glad I did. Honoré de Balzac is one of France's literary giants, and Le Père Goriot is considered to be the pivot of his incredible La Comédie Humaine series, an interconnecting collection of more than a hundred works set in the same place and time and recycling thousands of characters. In this novel, the reader is introduced to several characters who will go on to be mainstays of Balzac's fiction (Rastignac, one of the major characters, appears in twenty six of his novels) and many who have already made their bow in one of his other books.
From the rather narrow beginning described above, Balzac gradually expands his story, introducing us to a motley collection of people residing in Madame Vauquer's rather unsalubrious boarding house. Of the seven residents present at the start of the novel, the story revolves mainly around three: Eugène de Rastignac, a good-hearted young Law student from the provinces; Vautrin, an enigmatic figure with a shady past and an even shadier present; and Old Goriot himself, a retired vermicelli maker, who has been slipping further and further down the social ladder since arriving at Mme Vauquer's establishment.
The reason for Goriot's decline is his decision to give away the majority of his fortune to his two daughters, Anastasie and Delphine, on the event of their marriages, followed by his expulsion from their houses by his two sons-in-law owing to his inability to fit in to Parisian high society. When Rastignac begins to flirt with Delphine, the old man sees an opportunity to reconnect with at least one of his daughters, despite the young student not having enough money to play this high-stakes game. However, the mysterious and charismatic Vautrin has a plan to help young Rastignac out, involving Mlle Victorine Taillefer (another of the Vauquer boarders), her estranged father and a duel...
As you can tell from this brief description, there's a lot going on and a lot that Balzac wants to say through his fiction. One of the foremost ideas is family and the respect owed by the next generation to their fathers, and to underscore this idea, Balzac borrows liberally from Shakespeare, with Anastasie and Delphine taking just as much advantage of Goriot's foolish generosity as Gonoril and Regan of King Lear when he divided up his kingdom between them. Sadly, Goriot does not even have the compensation of a Cordelia figure (although Victorine, in a parallel plot, can be seen a Cordelia of sorts), and he lives to regret his impetuous generosity towards his daughters, which threatens to leave him destitute.
The book is also a classic example of a Bildungsroman, providing Rastignac with his baptism of fire in the Parisian haut-monde. Like many a literary young man before him (Werther, David Copperfield, Johnny Eames, to name but a few), our hero must grow up quickly, beset with temptation all around. He quickly decides to put his studies to one side in order to concentrate on cementing his place in the city's social fabric - and in the heart of Delphine de Nucingen. To do so, he also requires money, and while he manages to get by for a short while thanks to a small loan from his family (which, for them, however, is a more onerous undertaking), funding his Parisian adventure long-term will require more substantial support. And that's where we come to Vautrin...
...for the star creation of this novel is undoubtedly the mysterious, scene-stealing jack-of-all-trades, a best-supporting-actor performance if ever there was one (and, in my mind at least, if this role hasn't been played by Gérard Depardieu, it damn well should be). Vautrin has an animal magnetism which fascinates and unsettles the boarders at Mme Vauquer's in equal measure, his mood swinging between barely-concealed menace to delighted bonhomie (and back) in the twinkle of his roguish eye. He quickly develops a close relationship with Rastignac, becoming both a sort of father figure and a dark angel, tempting the young man by offering to fulfil his financial dreams - in return for a little something, of course. I won't say any more about this loveable rogue; I don't want to spoil your enjoyment of the book...
As an early 19th-Century novel, Le Père Goriot has a lot in common with the literature coming out of England at the time and may well have been an influence on some of the later Victorian writers. Anyone familiar with the likes of Dickens and Trollope will see parallels in this novel; however, it is the differences which are more interesting. When you compare the lively, boisterous atmosphere of Mme Vauquer's boarding house with the more genteel (though just as downtrodden) establishment run by Mrs. Roper in Trollope's The Small House at Allington, the contrast between the wanton carousing in Paris and the more formal and formulaic events in London is instantly clear. Another area where the French seemed to be a little more open than their English counterparts of the time is in the treatment of extra-marital affairs. While these liaisons are hushed up, if not actually hidden, as best as possible in English novels, Balzac's unhappy couples are fully aware of their partner's affairs, even arranging their schedules so as to be out of the way. One example of this is the Viscount de Beauséant, taking his wife in his carriage to meet her lover at the opera, before setting off to meet his own mistress: now that's a modern marriage for you!
All these elements (and a whole lot more that I, unfortunately, must omit, lest this blog post become a fully-blown thesis) help to make Le Père Goriot one of the most famous works in French literature and (much more importantly) a great book to read. I can't wait to acquire a few more of Balzac's series so that I can follow Rastignac, Vautrin et al. further along their tangled paths. Next time though, I'll choose my reading time more carefully (I think I'll start my books in the comfort of my own home, after the girls have gone to bed) - and if I see any students with Japanese textbooks nearby, I think I'll be changing carriages in future...
