IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
283
not again mentioned, pursues Madame Vauquer's character and
previous history. It would be a mistake, however, to see in this
separation of appearance on the one hand and character and
previous history on the other a deliberate principle of composition;
there are physical characteristics in this second part too
(((l'oeil
vitreux" ) ,
and Balzac very frequently makes a different disposition,
or mingles the physical, moral, and historical elements of a portrait
indiscriminately. In our case his pursuit of her character and previous
history does not serve to clarify either of them but rather to set
Madame Vauquer's darkness "in the right light," that is, in the
twilight of a petty and trivial demonism. So far as her previous his–
tory goes, the pension-mistress belongs to the category of women
of fifty or thereabouts
((qui ont eu des malheurs"
(plural!); Balzac
enlightens us not at all concerning her previous life, but instead
reproduces, partly in free indirect discourse, the formless, whining,
mendaciously colloquial chatter with which she habitually answers
sympathetic inquiries. But here again the suspicious plural occurs,
again avoiding particulars- her late husband had lost his money
((dans les malheurs"
- just as, some pages later, another suspicious
widow imparts, on the subject of her husband who had been a
count and a general, that he had fallen on
((les champs de bataille."
This conforms to the vulgar demonism of Madame Vauquer's char–
acter; she seems
((bonne femme au fond,"
she seems poor, but, as we
are later told, she has a very tidy little fortune and she is capable
of any baseness in order to improve her own situation a little-the
vulgar and trivial narrowness of the goal of her egoism, the mix–
ture of stupidity, slyness, and concealed vitality, again gives the
impression of something repulsively spectral; again there imposes
itself the comparison with a rat, or with some other animal making a
vulgarly demonic impression on the human imagination. The second
part of the description, then, is a supplement to the first; after
Madame Vauquer is presented in the first as synthesizing the milieu
she governs, the second deepens the impenetrability and abjectness of
her character, which is constrained to work itself out in the aforesaid
milieu .
In his entire work, as in this passage, Balzac feels his milieux,
different though they are, as organic and indeed demonic unities, and
seeks to convey this feeling to the reader. He not only, like Stendhal,
