The tales that made up La Comédie humaine are characterized by Balzac’s superb gift for storytelling, his rich sense of humor, and his delicate description of characters, scenes and places. In Le Père Goriot (1835), the tale of a penniless young provincial and the old man who gives up everything for his daughters, Balzac brings Paris to life almost as a character in its own right:
Left alone, Rastignac walked a few steps to the highest part of the cemetery, and saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding Seine. Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there. His gaze fixed almost avidly upon the space that lay between the column of the Place Vendôme and the dome of the Invalides; there lay the splendid world that he wished to conquer.
His imaginative gift and powers of description set the tone for the development of the 19th-century realist novel. As Oscar Wilde said, Balzac “created life, he did not copy it.” The world of La Comédie humaine stretched from Paris to the French countryside, and its rich cast included sensitive portraits not only of young provincial men on the make in Paris, such as Rastignac, but also of young and old women, bureaucrats, politicians, courtesans, spinsters, nobles, peasants, actors and innkeepers—in his words, “scenes of private life, Parisian life, political life, military life.” He also created the most unforgettable villain, the bisexual criminal mastermind turned police chief Vautrin, who was based on the real criminal-turned-police-chief Vidocq. It was Balzac who reflected that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” The greatest works in this vast body of stories include Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot, Lost Illusions (1837), La Cousine Bette (1846) and A Harlot High and Low (1838–47).
From the age of twenty-three, when he fell for the forty-five-year-old mother of some children he was tutoring, Balzac was in search of the ideal woman. He eventually found her in a Polish countess, Evelina Hańska, whom he married after a romantic correspondence that lasted fifteen years. By the time he married her, in March 1850, Balzac had no more than five months to live. He died in August, killed by the strain of his punishingly indulgent working habits. At his funeral, the writer Victor Hugo remembered Balzac as “among the brightest stars of his native land.” It was a fitting tribute.
PUSHKIN
1799–1837
The poet is dead: a slave to honor
Felled, by slanderous rumor
With a bullet in his breast, and thirsting for revenge
His proud head now bowed down.
The poet’s spirit could not bear
The shame of petty calumnies …
Mikhail Lermontov, from his homage to Pushkin, circulated secretly a few days after the great poet’s death
Alexander Pushkin is the heroic ideal of the romantic poet. A genius of exuberance, versatility, wit, poignancy and originality, a passionate and promiscuous lover of women, a victim of tyranny who remained true to his art—he personifies the triumph of creativity over the dead hand of bureaucracy. He helped create modern Russia—its culture, its language, its very image of itself. He also wrote history and short stories.
Pushkin is generally considered to be Russia’s greatest poet. Translation cannot do justice to the extraordinary way in which he molded the Russian language to his art, mixing archaic with modern, vernacular with formal, and readily inventing new words when old ones did not suffice. The profound simplicity of Pushkin’s poetry transformed the way that Russians—writers and ordinary people—use language.
The precocious son of an old noble family, Pushkin became renowned when, as a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, his first poetry was published. His romantic narrative poem Ruslan and Ludmilla, written six years later, broke every literary convention of its day and was a runaway success. The leader of Russian poetry’s old guard, Vasily Zhukovsky, gave Pushkin a portrait of himself inscribed: “To the victorious pupil from the defeated master.” Barely out of his teens, Pushkin was already recognized as Russia’s preeminent poet.
Pushkin’s astounding energy and drive transformed Russian literature. He cast off the stifling blanket of religion and censorship, creating works of extraordinary originality that laid the foundations of the modern Russian literary tradition. Eugene Onegin (1825–32) his great novel in verse, is considered by many to be the finest Russian novel ever written. Set in a Russian landscape with Russian characters, it was a decisive step away from the allegorical tradition and toward the realism later employed by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov and Bulgakov. This is the story of the doomed love between Tatiana, provincial beauty, and Onegin, cynical nobleman and foppish, bored intellectual. He flirts with her; she falls in love; he rejects her and kills her sister’s fiancé in a duel (foreshadowing Pushkin’s own death). Many years later, Onegin meets her again. She is now a St. Petersburg grande dame, a society beauty, a princess married to an aristocrat. He realizes he loves her—but she replies, “I love you but I am now another’s wife.” Onegin is heartbroken—he “stood seared as if by heaven’s fire. How deep his stricken heart is shaken. With what a tempest of desire.” The characters remain eternal but nothing is so timeless as the tragic sadness of Onegin’s love for the married Tatiana—and her undying love for him, loves that cannot ever be.
The poet-revolutionary was the image of the romantic hero. He was a sympathetic and social, rather than active, conspiratorial member of the aristocratic set later known as the Decembrists, who conspired to reform the oppressive autocracy of the tsars. The group’s members were famed for their drinking, gambling and womanizing as much as for their liberal views.
Pushkin’s work revolutionized the way Russians thought about their history and their drama, and especially the way they thought about their writers. Never one to play down his own achievements, Pushkin was one of the first Russian writers to make a collected edition of his various writings. Within a year of his death, a critic was able to declare: “Every educated Russian must have a complete Pushkin, otherwise he has no right to be considered either educated or Russian.”
Russia’s oppressive autocrats tried to break the will of the fiery radical. Pushkin was, in his own words, “persecuted six years in a row, stained by expulsion from the service, exiled to an out-of-the-way village for two lines in an intercepted letter.” It was not all bad: he adored the exotic romance of Odessa, Moldavia and the Caucasus, which inspired him. He also managed many affairs, keeping lists, sketches and poems to record his conquests, who included Princess Lise Vorontsov, wife of the viceroy of New Russia, Prince Michael Vorontsov and a great-niece of Catherine the Great’s minister Prince Potemkin. They probably had a child together (brought up as Vorontsov) and he wrote a poem to her called The Talisman.
But Pushkin was keenly aware of the oppressive hand of censorship and surveillance—and its potential to get worse. During the abortive Decembrist uprising of 1825, he could only look on helplessly as his generation’s dreams of liberty were ruthlessly smashed by the dreary martinet Tsar Nicholas I. Finally, beaten down by almost a decade of censorship and exile, Pushkin was wooed into Nicholas’s service with the illusory promise of reform. The tsar appointed himself as Pushkin’s personal censor.
Imperial favor broke Pushkin even more effectively than imperial displeasure. Personally censored by the tsar, Pushkin was rendered almost speechless. The volatile radical poet fell increasingly out of favor at court, but, despite his increasingly desperate pleas to retire to a life of literary seclusion, he was not allowed to leave. His popularity meant he was still viewed as a loose cannon. Besides, half the court, including the tsar, were infatuated with Pushkin’s beautiful wife Natalya. His misery, drinking and gambling increased.
Pushkin’s romantic death, the result of a simmering romantic crisis, turned the hero into a legend. In February 1837 the creepy and sleazy French social climber Georges d’Anthès, having been frustrated by Natalya’s decisive rejection of his approaches, publicly insulted her and challenged her husband to a duel. Pushkin, who had been itching to fight for months, accepted with alacrity. In the ensuing duel, P
ushkin was fatally wounded, dying two days later at the age of thirty-eight.
The volatile, charismatic poet-radical who fought for liberty and died for love is revered in Russia almost as a god. His statue stands in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, decked out with flowers even in deep winter. Pushkin had decreed in his great poem “Monument” that “My verses will be sung throughout all Russia’s vastness / My ashes will outlive and know no pale decay … ” In this he proved a prophet too.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS PÈRE & FILS
1802–1870 & 1824–1895
His successes … resound like a fanfare. The name of Alexandre Dumas is more than French, it is European; it is more than European, it is universal … Alexandre Dumas is one of those men who can be called the sowers of civilization.
Victor Hugo
Alexandre Dumas’s soaring imagination holds us spellbound. As vividly drawn in life as one of his own characters, this master storyteller scorned literary pretension. Irrepressible to the end, he swaggered through a life that might have sprung straight from the pages of his books.
Dumas’s rip-roaring historical novels are crammed with romance, adventure, courage and daring. At one moment comical and poignant, the next mysterious and terrifying, they induce every emotion except boredom. In The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask, Dumas created some of the most thrilling stories ever written. He wove together history and fantasy, using scraps gleaned from old books to embroider timeless characters and gripping plots. His fecund imagination has rendered the names d’Artagnan and Dantès as familiar as Louis XIV and Richelieu.
He was the son of a swashbuckling Creole general (himself the illegitimate son of a marquis) and an innkeeper’s daughter. Given his ancestry, it is hardly surprising that Alexandre Dumas père specialized in tales of romance, derring-do, betrayal and intrigue. The fatherless boy who grew up in the small French town of Villers-Cotterêts was the son of the “Black Count,” a flamboyant and eccentric Napoleonic general whose integrity brought him only disgrace and provoked an early death.
Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie was the Creole son of a black slave girl and a minor Norman marquis. Born in French Saint-Domingue in 1762 and raised by his mother’s family after she died when he was twelve, at eighteen Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France to be educated as befitted a nobleman. But when he joined the army as an ordinary soldier in 1786, he assumed his mother’s surname Dumas in order to avoid embarrassing his father’s family.
As the French Revolution overturned the strict hierarchy of France’s ancien régime, he rose up the army ranks. Dumas’s daring and skill in campaigns in the Vendée, in Italy and in Egypt had earned him the rank of general by the age of thirty-one. But in 1802 he was ordered to put down the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, and when he refused, Napoleon made his displeasure all too clear.
Politically disgraced, Dumas retired to the countryside, to the wife he had first met when he was billeted at her father’s inn in Villers-Cotterêts in 1789. Dogged by poverty and ill health, in 1806 the giant of a man died, leaving behind a widow and a small son and daughter.
The Black Count died in his forties, leaving his indigent widow to bring up two children on her own. When Dumas finally made his way to Paris, the mixed-race, rambunctious provincial was mocked for his frizzy blond curls and his antiquated dress. His father’s erstwhile friends evaded his pleas for patronage. Only a stroke of luck prevented an ignominious return to the countryside. Dumas’s beautiful penmanship secured him a position as a clerk in the office of the Duc d’Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe, 1830–48). It gave him enough money and plenty of time to pursue the writing that he believed would make his fortune. His faith was vindicated. In 1829 his play Henry III and his Court made him famous overnight.
The self-styled “king of the world of Romance” provided his audiences with a magical form of escapism. He was the champion of romanticism, seeing the theater as “above all a thing of the imagination” and rejecting the cold orations and philosophical monologues of traditional French drama. His characters fought, wept, made love and died on stage with passion, the triumphant climaxes of his plays rendering his audiences delirious. When Dumas started writing novels, his imagination enraptured Paris. As The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo appeared simultaneously, their daily installments of action and melodrama were instant talking points. Despite their tendency to melodrama, his characters were so exuberant that they still pulse with life today—the musketeers Aramis, Porthos, Athos and D’Artagnan (with their motto “One for all, and all for one”), the sinisterly beautiful Milady de Winter, and Edmond Dantès, the count of Monte Cristo himself.
In The Three Musketeers, D’Artagnan, the cocky but charming provincial Gascon swordsman, joins the experienced king’s men to fight the sinister intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu and others. In The Count of Monte Cristo, an innocent man, Dantès, is imprisoned forever in the Château d’If island prison, where an old prisoner helps him escape—“Death is the escape from the Château d’If”—to claim a buried fortune and mysterious title. Dantès—now Monte Cristo—returns to seek justice in the classic tale of revenge.
At the height of his success Dumas was Paris’ literary star. His image was on medallions and etchings. His workrooms were strewn with flowers and bursting with visitors. Extravagant, exuberantly dressed in capes and sporting flashy canes, with a menagerie of outlandish pets and an endless stream of still more glamorous mistresses, Dumas was the perfect subject for caricature. It was not always kind and it was often racist. But his generosity, his child-like sensitivities and his bombastic naivety earned him as much love as ridicule.
The critics sneered at Dumas’s popularity, at his readability, at his prodigious and varied output. He was never elected to the bastion of France’s artistic establishment, the Académie française. He was attacked in print for being no more than the foreman of a “novel factory” because he used collaborators. Assistants did indeed research and draft his work, but it was he who brought about the literary alchemy. Furiously scribbling away in his shirtsleeves, he injected the romance, suspense and humor that gave his work its magic. Dumas had no time for academic introspection. The self-styled popularizer wrote to entertain, to enchant and consume, to dispel the mundaneness of life. He succeeded. “It fertilizes the soul, the mind, the intelligence,” wrote Victor Hugo, one of France’s other titanic men of letters. Dumas “creates a thirst for reading.”
Dumas was always blithely unconcerned by the sniping of others less successful than himself. He abandoned his tenuous claim to the title of marquis; his name was title enough. He had his motto—“I love those who love me”—carved in huge letters on Monte Cristo, the opulent château he built to celebrate his success.
His lifestyle was precarious. Debts forced him to sell Monte Cristo. On his deathbed he remarked wryly: “I came to Paris with twenty-four francs. That is exactly the sum with which I die.” His action-packed cape-and-sword romances became less fashionable as literary styles changed. But he was undaunted by his oscillating fortunes. Irrepressible and indefatigable, he continued to write. He founded magazines and he lectured. He even participated in Garibaldi’s campaign to unify Italy.
When Dumas died, at the home of his devoted son at Puys near Dieppe, it was, in the words of one young journalist, “as though we had all lost a friend.” The “affectionate and much-loved soul” was also the “splendid magician” who created works that gave “passage into unknown worlds.”
Dumas had a son who would also make his name in literature. In 1822, when he was twenty, Alexandre Dumas had moved to Paris to make his fortune and quickly took up with the first of many mistresses, Marie-Catherine Labay, a dressmaker who lived in the rooms opposite him. Young Alexandre, the child of this affair, was six years old before his father formally recognized him and won custody of him in a vicious legal battle. (Father and son, both Alexandre and both writers, are distinguished as père and fils.)
His father cherished him and gave him the most expensive education possible (although he could not prevent his son’s classmates from taunting him for his mixed-race heritage). But his mother’s distress at losing her son was an experience that the adult Dumas fils would revisit in his work.
The son adored his father but was different from him in almost every way. Dumas fils, a member of the Académie française, wrote moralizing novels and plays that made him the darling of the French literary establishment. His love affair as a youth with the young courtesan Marie Duplessis, one of the celebrated beauties of her time, inspired his best-known work, La Dame aux camélias (1848), in which a young man falls in love with a beautiful girl of pleasure. His father ends it and she dies of tuberculosis. Verdi made it into the opera La Traviata (1853), and there have been eight film versions starring actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to Greta Garbo and Isabelle Huppert.
Father and son both produced great works, but The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo—the father’s masterpieces—remain not just timeless but universal, still bestsellers and the subjects of innumerable movies. In 2002, President Jacques Chirac of France presided as Republican Guards dressed as the Musketeers moved Dumas’s body to rest in the Panthéon. “With you,” said the president, “we were D’Artagnan and Monte Cristo!”
DISRAELI
1804–1881
Mr. Disraeli … has always behaved extremely well to me, and has all the right feelings for a minister towards the sovereign … He is full of poetry, romance and chivalry. When he knelt down to kiss my hand, which he took in both of his, he said “in loving loyalty and faith.”