IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
289
tionary profiteer:
«
Les epoques diteignent sur les hommes qui les
traversent. Ces deux personnages prouvaient la verite de cet axiome
par l'opposition des teintes historiques empreintes dans leurs phy–
sionomies, dans leurs discours, dans leurs idees et leurs coutumes."
And in another passage from the same novel, in reference to a house
in
A1en~on,
he speaks of the
archetype
which it represents; here we
have not the archetype of a nonhistorical abstraction but that of the
maisons bourgeoises
of a large part of France; the house, whose
piquant local character he has previously described, deserves its
place in the novel all the more, he says,
«
qu'il explique des moeurs
et represente des idees."
Despite many obscurities and exaggerations, biological and his–
torical elements are successfully combined in Balzac's work because
they are both consonant with its Romantic-dynamic character,
which occasionally passes over into the Romantic-magical and the
demonic; in both cases one feels the operation of irrational "forces."
In contrast, the classicizing-moral element very often gives the
im–
pression of being a foreign body. It finds expression more especially
in Balzac's tendency to formulate generalized apophthegms of a
moral cast. They are sometimes witty as individual observations, but
for the most part they are far too generalized; sometimes too they
are not even witty; and when they develop into long disquisitions,
they are often-to use the language of the vulgar-mere "hogwash."
I will quote some brief moralizing dicta which occur in
Pere Corioi:
Le bonheur est la poesie des femmes comme la toilette en est le
fard .-[La science et l'amour
...
J
sont des asymptotes qui ne peuvent
jamais se rejoindre. -S'il est un sentiment inne dans le coeur de ['hom–
me, n'est-ce pas l'orgu eil de la protection exerce
a
tout moment en
faveur d'un etre faible?-Quand on connatt Paris, on ne croit
Ii
rie711 de
ce qui s'y dit, et l'on ne dit rien de ce qui s'y fait.-Un sentiment, n'est–
ce pas le monde dans une pensee?
At best one can say of such apophthegms that they do not deserve
the honor bestowed upon them-that of being erected into generali–
zations. They are
aper~us
produced by the momentary situation,
sometimes extremely cogent, sometimes absurd, not always in good
taste. Balzac aspires to be a classical moralist, sometimes he even
echoes La Bruyere (e.g., in a passage from
Pere Corioi
where the
physical and psychological effects of the possession of money are
