Beatrix

De Balzac Honore, Prescott Wormeley Katharine

Description

Honore de Balzac excelled at creating unforgettable characters, but most of his creations were works of pure fiction. Many critics have asserted that the novel Beatrix is a roman a clef depicting the life of the French memoirist George Sand, as well as the larger cultural shift from an era of genteel aristocracy and class stratification to a more democratic way of living.

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776539598
• Langue: English

Extrait

BEATRIX
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HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by
KATHARINE PRESCOTT WORMELEY
 
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Beatrix First published in 1839 Epub ISBN 978-1-77653-959-8 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77653-960-4 © 2014 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Note I - A Breton Town and Mansion II - The Baron, His Wife, and Sister III - Three Breton Silhouettes IV - A Normal Evening V - Calyste VI - Biography of Camille Maupin VII - Les Touches VIII - La Marquise Beatrix IX - A First Meeting X - Drama XI - Female Diplomacy XII - Correspondence XIII - Duel Between Women XIV - An Excursion to Croisic XV - Conti XVI - Sickness Unto Death XVII - A Death: A Marriage XVIII - The End of a Honey-Moon XIX - The First Lie of a Pious Duchess XX - A Short Treatise on Certainty: But Not from Pascal's Point of View XXI - The Wickedness of a Good Woman XXII - The Normal History of an Upper-Class Grisette XXIII - One of the Diseases of the Age XXIV - The Influence of Social Relations and Position XXV - A Prince of Bohemia XXVI - Disillusions—In All but La Fontaine's Fables Addendum Endnotes
Note
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It is somewhat remarkable that Balzac, dealing as he did with traits of character and the minute and daily circumstances of life, has never been accused of representing actual persons in the two or three thousand portraits which he painted of human nature.
In "The Great Man of the Provinces in Paris" some likenesses were imagined: Jules Janin in Etienne Lousteau, Armand Carrel in Michel Chrestien, and, possibly, Berryer in Daniel d'Arthez. But in the present volume, "Beatrix," he used the characteristics of certain persons, which were recognized and admitted at the time of publication. Mademoiselle des Touches (Camille Maupin) is George Sand in character, and the personal description of her, though applied by some to the famous Mademoiselle Georges, is easily recognized from Couture's drawing. Beatrix, Conti, and Claude Vignon are sketches of the Comtesse d'Agoult, Liszt, and the well-known critic Gustave Planche.
The opening scene of this volume, representing the manners and customs of the old Breton family, a social state existing no longer except in history, and the transition period of the vieille roche as it passed into the customs and ideas of the present century, is one of Balzac's remarkable and most famous pictures in the "Comedy of Human Life."
K.P.W.
I - A Breton Town and Mansion
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France, especially in Brittany, still possesses certain towns completelyoutside of the movement which gives to the nineteenth century itspeculiar characteristics. For lack of quick and regular communicationwith Paris, scarcely connected by wretched roads with thesub-prefecture, or the chief city of their own province, these townsregard the new civilization as a spectacle to be gazed at; it amazesthem, but they never applaud it; and, whether they fear or scoff at it,they continue faithful to the old manners and customs which have comedown to them. Whoso would travel as a moral archaeologist, observing meninstead of stones, would find images of the time of Louis XV. in many avillage of Provence, of the time of Louis XIV. in the depths of Pitou,and of still more ancient times in the towns of Brittany. Most of thesetowns have fallen from states of splendor never mentioned by historians,who are always more concerned with facts and dates than with the truerhistory of manners and customs. The tradition of this splendor stilllives in the memory of the people,—as in Brittany, where the nativecharacter allows no forgetfulness of things which concern its own land.Many of these towns were once the capitals of a little feudal State,—acounty or duchy conquered by the crown or divided among many heirs, ifthe male line failed. Disinherited from active life, these heads becamearms; and arms deprived of nourishment, wither and barely vegetate.
For the last thirty years, however, these pictures of ancient timesare beginning to fade and disappear. Modern industry, working for themasses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, the works ofwhich were once as personal to the consumer as to the artisan. Nowadayswe have products , we no longer have works . Public buildings,monuments of the past, count for much in the phenomena of retrospection;but the monuments of modern industry are freestone quarries, saltpetremines, cotton factories. A few more years and even these old cities willbe transformed and seen no more except in the pages of this iconography.
One of the towns in which may be found the most correct likeness of thefeudal ages is Guerande. The name alone awakens a thousand memories inthe minds of painters, artists, thinkers who have visited the slopes onwhich this splendid jewel of feudality lies proudly posed to command theflux and reflux of the tides and the dunes,—the summit, as it were,of a triangle, at the corners of which are two other jewels not lesscurious: Croisic, and the village of Batz. There are no towns afterGuerande except Vitre in the centre of Brittany, and Avignon in thesouth of France, which preserve so intact, to the very middle of ourepoch, the type and form of the middle ages.
Guerande is still encircled with its doughty walls, its moats arefull of water, its battlements entire, its loopholes unencumbered withvegetation; even ivy has never cast its mantle over the towers, squareor round. The town has three gates, where may be seen the rings of theportcullises; it is entered by a drawbridge of iron-clamped wood, nolonger raised but which could be raised at will. The mayoralty wasblamed for having, in 1820, planted poplars along the banks of the moatto shade the promenade. It excused itself on the ground that the longand beautiful esplanade of the fortifications facing the dunes had beenconverted one hundred years earlier into a mall where the inhabitantstook their pleasure beneath the elms.
The houses of the old town have suffered no change; and they haveneither increased nor diminished. None have suffered upon their frontagefrom the hammer of the architect, the brush of the plasterer, nor havethey staggered under the weight of added stories. All retain theirprimitive characteristics. Some rest on wooden columns which formarcades under which foot-passengers circulate, the floor planks bendingbeneath them, but never breaking. The houses of the merchants are smalland low; their fronts are veneered with slate. Wood, now decaying,counts for much in the carved material of the window-casings andthe pillars, above which grotesque faces look down, while shapes offantastic beasts climb up the angles, animated by that great thoughtof Art, which in those old days gave life to inanimate nature. Theserelics, resisting change, present to the eye of painters those duskytones and half-blurred features in which the artistic brush delights.
The streets are what they were four hundred years ago,—with oneexception; population no longer swarms there; the social movement is nowso dead that a traveller wishing to examine the town (as beautiful asa suit of antique armor) may walk alone, not without sadness, through adeserted street, where the mullioned windows are plastered up to avoidthe window-tax. This street ends at a postern, flanked with a wall ofmasonry, beyond which rises a bouquet of trees planted by the handsof Breton nature, one of the most luxuriant and fertile vegetationsin France. A painter, a poet would sit there silently, to taste thequietude which reigns beneath the well-preserved arch of the postern,where no voice comes from the life of the peaceful city, and where thelandscape is seen in its rich magnificence through the loop-holes of thecasemates once occupied by halberdiers and archers, which are not unlikethe sashes of some belvedere arranged for a point of view.
It is impossible to walk about the place without thinking at every stepof the habits and usages of long-past times; the very stones tellof them; the ideas of the middle ages are still there with all theirancient superstitions. If, by chance, a gendarme passes you, with hissilver-laced hat, his presence is an anachronism against which yoursense of fitness protests; but nothing is so rare as to meet a being oran object of the present time. There is even very little of the clothingof the day; and that little the inhabitants adapt in a way to theirimmutable customs, their unchangeable physiognomies. The public squareis filled with Breton costumes, which artists flock to draw; these standout in wonderful relief upon the scene around them. The whiteness of thelinen worn by the paludiers (the name given to men who gather salt inthe salt-marshes) contrasts vigorously with the blues and browns of thepeasantry and the original and sacredly preserved jewelry of thewomen. These two classes, and that of the sailors in their jerkins andvarnished leather caps are as distinct from one another as the castesof India, and still recognize the distance that parts them from thebourgeoisie, the nobility, and the clergy. All lines are clearly marked;there the revolutionary level found the masses too rugged and too hardto plane; its instrument would have been notched, if not broken. Thecharacter of immutability which science gives to zoological species isfound in Breton human nature. Even now, after the Revolution of 1830,Guerande is still a town apart, essentially Breton, fervently Catholic,silent, self-contained,—a place where modern ideas have littl