A HARLOT HIGH AND LOW
Honoré de Balzac was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendôme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyer’s clerk then as a hack-writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name, The Chouans. During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title The Human Comedy. He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Evelina Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.
Rayner Heppenstall was born in Yorkshire in 1911 and was educated locally and in Calais and Strasbourg. He was the author of eight novels, some verse, much criticism, three volumes of reminiscences, four of French criminal history and two of the Newgate Calendar. Work in translation has included Chateaubriand’s Atala and René and, in collaboration with Lindy Foord, his daughter, Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel. He also translated René Floriot’s book on Errors of Justice in the French Courts. During the war he served from 1940 until 1945 in the Royal Field Artillery. He resigned from the B.B.C. in 1967 where he had worked for more than twenty years as a writer-producer in the Features Department and for a short time in the Drama Department. He died in 1981, leaving a wife, two children and five grandchildren.
Honoré de Balzac
A HARLOT
HIGH AND LOW
(Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes)
TRANSLATED AND
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
RAYNER HEPPENSTALL
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Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes first published 1839–47
This edition published in Penguin Classics 1970
24
Translation and Introduction copyright © Rayner Heppenstall, 1970
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 9781101491959
Introduction
IT is, I fancy, generally known that characters from one Balzac novel are likely to reappear in others. The editor of the Classiques Garnier edition lists forty-four characters in the present volume who may also be found elsewhere. Many of them are quite unimportant to the action, while the juvenile lead, Lucien Chardon, dit de Rubempré, has been met with only once before and will never be seen again for the best of reasons. The other novel of which he is the hero is Illusions perdues, and to that novel this one may, to that extent, be considered a sequel, though within the large framework of Balzac’s Comédie humaine the earlier novel is classed as one of the ‘Scenes of Provincial Life’ and the present volume as one of the ‘Scenes of Parisian Life’, a somewhat arbitrary distinction, since much of the action of Illusions perdues takes place in Paris.
In it, we find Lucien Chardon, a young man of modest origins but with some claim to nobility (and to the name ‘de Rubempré’) on his mother’s side, a poet and vain of his looks and determined to put them to use, in the southern town of Angoulême. Taken up by a local grande dame, he goes to Paris, sets foot in the literary world but sinks to the lowest depths of journalism, leaves his protectress and becomes the lover of a woman of the town, Coralie, who dies, and returns to the provinces, not merely dejected but shamed by a piece of financial trickery which has got his amiable brother-in-law into trouble. Towards the end of the book, he sets off one morning to drown himself in the Charente, but meets a Spanish priest on a diplomatic mission, who at once takes a fancy to the young man and promises him a great future. Lucien gets into the priest’s carriage, and they drive on towards Paris, Lucien’s sister presently receiving a letter from him which encloses money and says that she mustn’t worry. Lucien is all right, though he feels somewhat enslaved.
The date at the end of Illusions perdues is the late summer or early autumn of 1823. The present novel begins early the next year. If the reader wished, he might now simply read on. In the first chapter, he would be duly mystified by the powerfully built man in the domino, but so he would if he already knew Illusions perdues. If, on the other hand, he had previously read Illusions perdues, he would know that group of horrible journalists. Even an acquaintance with what is probably Balzac’s best-known novel, Le Père Goriot, might bring back memories of a young man called Rastignac at Ma Vauquer’s. Rastignac’s brief exchange with the man in the domino might, indeed, tell the reader most of what is presently to be revealed about the Spanish priest. Rastignac, it may be noted, recurs in more of Balzac’s novels than any other single character. He is said to have been based on the leading politician, Louis-Adolphe Thiers. However, that is a matter we don’t need to bother our heads with here.
In any important sense, it is only in connection with Lucien de Rubempré that we should think of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes as a sequel to Illusions perdues. About the supposed Spanish priest, who in the end turns out to be the true protagonist of the novel, we might learn more from Le Père Goriot but do not in fact need to know more than the present volume tells us, though, if we cared to study him in depth, there is at the end of Illusions perdues a brief passage about him which has become very famous. Of this, more in a moment. I turn now to Esther.
No reader of Balzac has ever met her before or will ever meet her again, though he may have met her mother in César Birotteau and her mother’s uncle there and elsewhere, most notably in Gobseck, a story published in 1830, four years before Le Père Goriot, seven before César Birotteau, thirteen before Illusions perdues, seventeen before the completion of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. His niece, Sara, a prostitute known as ‘la belle Hollandaise’, Esther’s mother, was murdered in 1818, but Gobseck, a Jewish moneylender from Antwerp, was not to die until 1830. As the reader will see, had he died earlier, none of the sad events in this book need have taken place. When he wrote Gobseck, Honoré de Balzac was a young man of thirty-one. When he finished Splendeurs et misères, he was forty-eight and had three more years to live, for he died at the same age as Proust, having achieved at least quantitatively more.
His intention had been to write a novel about prostitution. His title for this was to be La Torpille, the professional nickname of the heroine, Esther Gobseck, Sara’s daughter. La Torpille as projected was in fact written, and much of it was published in periodicals, some under that title, some under the title Esther, ou les
amours d’un banquier. Projected in 1837, partly written in 1838 and completed in 1843, La Torpille now forms Parts One and Two of the present book. After the death of Esther, the book is not much concerned with prostitution, and so the overall title is something of a misnomer, though fully applicable to Parts One and Two. Of the sense of the nickname and first title, I shall need to say something in the course of justifying what I have done with it.
About the forty-three characters in this book, other than Lucien, who occur elsewhere, the reader who wants to follow them up could do much worse than consult Félicien Marceau’s book, Balzac and his World, readily available in English. The hypothetical reader who knows only Le Père Goriot may care to be reminded that one of the Goriot daughters, with whom Rastignac is having an affair, is married to Baron Nucingen, of whom we hear much in the present volume and in three others. In Le Père Goriot, Dr Bianchon is a medical student who plays a wholly admirable part. Corentin and Peyrade appear elsewhere, as does the unfortunate Contenson under another name. Mme de Sérisy figured in La Femme de trente ans. Clotilde de Grandlieu remains faithful to Lucien’s memory in Béatrix. But knowledge of all these ramifications can add only marginally to any reader’s enjoyment of the present volume. Of the supposed Spanish priest Don Carlos Herrera, whose real name turns out to be Jacques Collin, a little may perhaps usefully be said here.
In Le Père Goriot, he appears as the respectable, if disconcerting, Monsieur Vautrin, life and soul of the party at the table d’hôte in Madame Vauquer’s boarding-house, who was really… what he turned out to be. The events in Le Père Goriot belong to the years 1819–20 (the book was written in 1834). In 1840, a play called Vautrin was performed once at the Porte Saint Martin theatre. It is not a good play, but the shortness of its run was due to the fact that the star, the great actor of his day, Frederick Lemaître, made himself up in one scene to look like the reigning monarch, Louis-Philippe. The basis for Lemaître’s unfortunate joke (perhaps, indeed, not so intended) was this. It was widely understood, by 1840, that the figure of Vautrin in M. Balzac’s famous novel had been based on a real-life police chief, formerly an escaped convict, finally retired some eight years before, who had indeed borne some resemblance to Louis-Philippe, a fact which, after 1830, the date of Louis-Philippe’s accession, had frequently been made the subject of comment, doubtless to the detriment of Vidocq. For the real-life figure was that great name in criminological history, François-Eugène Vidocq, the ex-convict who became the founder of the French Sûreté and thus the ancestor of criminal investigation departments throughout the world.
Of course, to say that Vidocq was ‘the original’ of Balzac’s Vautrin is greatly to over-simplify the matter. He has also been said to be ‘the original’ of Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Both these characters in great works of fiction had, indeed, something in common with the real-life Vidocq, but the differences are as significant as the resemblances. This is a matter I study closely in a recent volume. Here, I must content myself with repeating what has been so often said and with qualifying it. The Jacques Collin of the present volume, for instance, owes something to at least four other real-life figures, those of the impostors Coignard and a supposed Count of Montealbano, to a master of disguise, Anthime Collet, and even to the murderer Lacenaire. About Vidocq, there was never the least suggestion of homosexuality. His recorded last words were that he had too much loved women, and he more obviously resembled the noisily jovial Monsieur Vautrin of Le Père Goriot than the scarred and ravaged colossus of Splendeurs et misères. He hadn’t the education to pass himself off in Paris as a priest. Among the incidents in his life which are paralleled in the supposed life of Vautrin (but not at all that of Jean Valjean) is that he was first convicted of forgery (Jean Valjean, a simple peasant, archetypally stole a loaf of bread). And then, at the end, we return to the basic parallel. Jacques Collin, like the real-life François-Eugène, is appointed head of a crime squad, though even here the dates are very different indeed.
By 1830, Vidocq had retired (he was to stage a brief comeback, a benevolent industrial enterprise, paralleled by that of Jean Valjean, having failed). He had first entered police service in 1812, under Napoleon, and was given his own section in 1817, under Louis XVIII. In this novel, Vautrin succeeds Bibi-Lupin, himself an ex-convict, who himself bears some resemblance to the real-life Vidocq, at least in his physical appearance, while a man with a comical name of the same type, Coco-Lacour (himself appointed on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, à fripon fripon et demi), was in real life Vidocq’s first, short-lived successor. The point hardly needs labouring. About the figure of Vautrin, the reader who doesn’t know Balzac in a large way may care to be told, however, that, at a supposedly later date, he reappears in his ‘last incarnation’ in La Cousine Bette, a novel written and published earlier than Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. There the reader would receive the impression that his real name was Vautrin, not Jacques Collin.
How the homosexual thing came in, I don’t know. To us, it is certainly there. How much it was there to Balzac is a different matter. He knew about the existence of male prostitutes, that is certain. He knew that prison life tended to foster homosexual practices. I am nevertheless far from certain that he conceived the relations between Lucien and his Mephistopheles to be anything like those we now regard as normal between men whom we describe as consenting adults. Not to put too fine a point upon it, if he did, the sum total of sexual services then required of Lucien would be such that we need hardly feel surprised that, on his free evenings, all he wanted to do was recline on a divan and smoke a hookah. The idea of Jacques Collin as homosexual Mephistopheles to a succession of young Fausts was, I suppose, first suggested by Proust. The famous passage I spoke of earlier, towards the end of Illusions perdues, shows the Spanish priest halting his carriage and gazing at the early home of young Rastignac. This passage was described by Proust’s Baron de Charlus as ‘the Tristesse d’Olympio of pederasty’ (Tristesse d’Olympio being a poem by Victor Hugo meditating amid scenes of lost happiness). It will now retain that flavour for ever. I remain unconvinced that it is what Balzac had in mind. There is, for instance, no suggestion in Le Père Goriot or, retrospectively, in the novel before us that the ambitious Rastignac had ever given M. Vautrin or anyone else that kind of pleasure. What Rastignac mainly represented to Balzac was persistent ambition, and at that moment Mephistopheles was plotting a great future for another Faust.
The Translation
POOR workmen blame their tools, and the difficulties of its translator do not ordinarily concern the reader of a novel from a foreign language. The thing should simply read well in its new language and the translator’s fidelity to his original be taken for granted. In the present case, there were, however, one or two problems which I hope were insoluble, since I am conscious of not having solved them. Nor can they be effectively concealed. They appear as snags on the surface. The reader is bound to notice them.
Of such unsolved problems the least deeply significant but most recurrently tedious was the dialogue given to Baron Nucingen, the banker, commonly understood to be Alsatian but on occasion referred to, in respect of his way of speech, as a Polish Jew. In the original, Balzac prints all his lines in italics, and he distorts them to the point of near-unintelligibility in a perfectly systematic fashion, always changing certain vowels and, in the case of consonants, everywhere substituting a voiced for an unvoiced, an unvoiced for a voiced, consonant, i.e., a p for a b but also a b for a p, a t for a d but also a d for a t, a k for a hard g and vice versa, ch for j, j for ch and so on. I have been less systematic. In the result, I fancy that what Nucingen says is in general a bit less immediately unintelligible, though not much. Whenever I saw dialogue in italics coming up, I groaned and was tempted to give up. I did not feel justified in too much pre-alleviating the reader’s inevitable groans. To be largely unintelligible is an essential part of the baron’s character. No doubt to the reader, as it was to the tra
nslator, it will be a great relief when he finally disappears on page 290, having been replaced briefly by a supposed Englishman.
An obviously difficult but more interesting problem was the underworld slang largely concentrated in Part Four. There was an English equivalent at the time, some of it already to be found among the Elizabethans, some of it oddly surviving in the form of schoolgirl or Mayfair affectation, some wrongly thought to be of recent American importation. Again, I have been somewhat less systematic than Balzac, who, it may be noted, was himself no great authority on the subject, which could be quickly read up from glossaries published in his day, notably that appended to one of the volumes of Vidocq apocrypha, Les Voleurs. Not all Balzac’s forms can be traced to their sources, however, and some of them suggest that he misunderstood. The most fascinating of all these words was, to me, ‘dab’. I suppose it was of gipsy origin. Certainly it was international, developing in English rather towards the side of practised skill (as in ‘dab hand’ or ‘to be a dab at’), in French towards the side of leadership. At any rate, the reader may be assured that, wherever he reads ‘dab’ in this translation, he would be reading just that also in French. Odd uses of words, as opposed to the use of odd words, I have sometimes translated literally, as in the case of ‘sanglier’ for a priest or ‘la Cigogne’ for what is only very loosely equivalent to the office of our Director of Public Prosecutions. This practice will, I hope, not be found to have introduced any new element of confusion.
Felt by criminals to be the seat of the authority they dread at the Law Courts, what they describe (for no obvious reason) as the Stork is perhaps no less oddly described by lawyers to this day as ‘le Parquet’. This term is, I am told, commonly understood in the legal world to derive from the fact that magistrates from the procuracy take the floor. They belong, that is to say, to the standing magistracy, the magistrature debout, as opposed to the seated magistracy or Bench, the magistrature assise. For prosecuting counsel in French courts of assize are magistrates and wear red gowns. They never speak for the defence in criminal cases, any more than black-gowned advocates ever directly prosecute. To the French, it seems odd that a barrister may, with us, even if he is a Q.C., sometimes present, and sometimes oppose, a case brought by the Crown. As Procureur Général in Paris (there are procureurs-généraux in the departments, just as there are attorneys general in the American states) M. de Granville was, in effect, both Director of Public Prosecutions and Attorney General, with the important difference that, unlike our Attorney General, he was not a member of the government of the day. The Keeper of the Seals, on the other hand, was. ‘Keeper of the Seals’ is, in France, simply another title of the Minister of Justice. Like our Attorney General, M. de Granville might himself speak for the prosecution in court, though some lesser representative of the public ministry might equally, when not on his feet, occupy that little horse-box where prosecuting counsel sits most of the time and for which also ‘le parquet’ is an appropriate name.