4. A magical animal, part horse and part griffin, best known as Astolfo’s mount in Orlando Furioso.
5. Some fifteen miles east of Marseille.
6. Founded by Abelard in 1122, the Order of the Paraclete became home to a community of nuns headed by Héloïse. It was there that she wrote the letters for which she is famous.
7. A silly little pun on Louise’s part: griffe is the French word for “claw.”
8. Which is to say three hundred thousand francs; the livre fell out of use long before Louise’s birth, but the term was still used, interchangeably with franc, where matters of high finance were concerned.
9. A powerful family of bankers and merchants in Genoa from the twelfth century on, the Lomellinis would die out by the end of the eighteenth century for lack of a male heir.
10. Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1815) and Germaine de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) are two fundamental works of French romanticism.
11. Today’s Place de la Concorde.
12. That is, one whose elevation to the nobility came after the Revolution and is owed to Napoleon.
13. The civil code requires that parental legacies be divided equally among offspring. In order to set the firstborn son up for life, families like Renée’s claim payment of a dowry that is never actually paid; that sum, being deducted from the daughter’s inheritance, can then be given to the son.
14. A fairly modest Provençal farmhouse of generally two or three floors; not grand but by no means a hovel.
15. The absolutist tendencies of the Bourbon Ferdinand VII of Spain were continually contested throughout his reign. The Liberal insurrection of 1820 to 1823—in which the fictive Don Felipe Hénarez was an important figure, along with the real Valdez and Riego—ended with the intervention of French troops led by the Duke d’Angoulême, but not before Ferdinand assured the Liberals, falsely, that they need fear no reprisals once he was back on the throne. While Hénarez and Valdez were able to flee, Riego was hanged.
16. That is, of course, to King Ferdinand, the “absolute king,” as Felipe calls him.
17. Galignani remains an important English-language bookstore in Paris to this day.
18. Today the rue de Bellechasse, a few blocks east of Les Invalides.
19. Overthrown in 344 BC, Dionysius the Younger, King of Syracuse, fled to Corinth and became a teacher.
20. The mother of a sultan.
21. A representative in the National Assembly, a legislative body more or less like our House of Representatives.
22. The story goes that François I staged a lion fight for the amusement of the court; the anonymous lover of the Count de Lorge, seeking to prove her beloved’s courage, tossed her glove into the ring and begged the count to bring it back to her. He did, but he ended his liaison with the lady then and there, on the grounds that she had exposed him to an unnecessary danger purely out of vanity.
23. A celebrated Spanish general, one of the architects of the retaking of Grenada from the Moors in the late fifteenth century.
24. Grand Inquisitor of Toledo (1436–1517).
25. The reference is to a struggle for power in first century BC Rome: Sulla was backed by the aristocracy, Marius by the people.
26. Louis XVIII would indeed die in 1824, to be succeeded by his brother, Charles X. The absolutist excesses of Charles’s reign would lead to the revolution of 1830.
27. A majorat is a guarantee of a certain part of the family fortune for the eldest son, who would also be able to take his share of the remaining assets; Louise is thus to suffer the same despoliation as Renée.
28. Ferdinand VII spent the early years of his reign—from 1808 to 1814—as a ruler in exile, essentially under house arrest, on Napoleon’s orders, at the Château de Valençay.
29. Louise is paraphrasing a line from Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Cinna.
30. In addition to castles, presumably.
31. Lovelace is a character in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, and Saint-Preux in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s La nouvelle Héloïse.
32. Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus and Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée are two examples of the seventeenth-century “précieux” mode, full of long, abstruse discussions of subtle amorous emotions. The Courts of Love were perhaps fictive assemblies of noble men and ladies in eleventh-century Provence, charged with deciding tricky questions of love and gallantry.
33. Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) was a conservative politician and political philosopher, a foe of the Revolution, and an ardent believer in the divine right of kings. He argued that the family is the model for all well-ordered societies; the authority of the father is reproduced in the authority of the king, and indeed in the authority of God.
34. That is, the Cortes Generales: the Spanish legislature.
35. From the Paradiso:“Imperishable wealth, without fear!”
36. “Vive le roi quand même!” (“Long live the king, all the same!”) were the final words of a pamphlet written by Chateaubriand in 1816, in which he denounced Louis XVIII as insufficiently faithful to the Royalist cause. Louise could of course not have known—but Balzac did—that it was also the cry of the Legitimists in 1830, expressing their disdain for the newly crowned Louis-Philippe.
37. Balzac has cirage rather than cigare, making Felipe the color of “a Havana shoe wax”; I read this as a slip of the pen.
38. Rabelais’s supposed last words: “I go to seek a great perhaps.”
39. An epistolary novel by Étienne Pivert de Senancour, a classic of early romanticism in which a tortured young man living in the backwater of the Jura writes a distant friend of his loneliness, his ennui, his inertia.
40. The Roman goddess of childbirth.
41. “We always show our faces.”
42. That is, in the fifteenth century.
43. That is, than any masterpiece or any fine painting.
44. A journalist and epigrammatist of staunchly Royalist sympathies, Antoine de Rivarol was the author of a scathing mockery of late eighteenth-century sentimental or pastoral writers such as Salomon Gessner and Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian.
45. The nymph Egeria offered wise counsel to the early Roman king Numa Pompilius.
46. The pun is of course intended: a soeur d’élection is a chosen sister; in this case, their sisterhood is not entirely untouched by electoral questions.
47. Either Renée or Balzac is evidently unaware that in English adjectives do not agree in gender and number with the noun that they modify.
PART TWO
1. Louise is citing a line from Racine’s Andromaque.
2. To an English speaker, Marie is unambiguously a woman’s name, but in French it can be a man’s as well.
3. Lady Brandon’s decline and death is recounted in the short story “La Grenadière,” but in that tale Balzac does not suggest that her demise was caused by Lady Dudley, a recurring character in the Human Comedy and the archetype of the vengeful lover.
4. In her notes to the Garnier-Flammarion edition of this novel, Arlette Michel suggests that Louise is alluding to Princess Belgiojoso, who moved to Switzerland after separating from her husband.
5. A garden in the English style, so named because it was laid out on the orders of Louis XVIII in 1816.
6. Louise lives close by the royal domain of Saint-Cloud, whose maintenance was paid for from the Civil List (an annual allowance for necessary expenses) of Louis-Philippe. The slightly mocking tone of Louise’s remark comes from her dislike, as a dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat, of the new, non-Bourbon king.
7. Horns being the emblem of the cuckold.
8. The Roman consul Publius Decius Mus died in combat in 340 BC, after a dream in which it was foretold that the battle to come would be won by the army whose general voluntarily sacrificed his life.
9. Cornelia Africana was seen as a model of feminine virtue in ancient Rome, not least for her devotion to her children and her skill at guiding their political careers. Asked why her appear
ance was so modest in spite of her wealth, she pointed at her children and replied, “These are my jewels.”
10. A sort of goatee, covering the chin and the space beneath the lower lip.
11. Opposed to the absolutist tendencies of Charles X, the Marquis de Lafayette became the unofficial leader of the revolution of 1830, which broke out in response to the king’s edict stripping the middle class of their voting rights. Charles rescinded that edict, but by that time Lafayette had already named Louis-Philippe as his successor, and so the king’s change of heart came too late.
Honoré de Balzac, Letters of Two Brides
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