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PARTISAN REVIEW
the man who himself, subjectively, sees himself in his own eyes as a
romantic wooer; this, perhaps, was a privilege granted in return for,
or even conditional on, the author's precisely and quite naturally
conceiving the noblest feelings in such a vulgar way that when he
supposed he was describing the fulfilment of a life-long dream of
happiness he actually told us about the social advantages of that mar–
riage. Here there is no call to differentiate between his letters and
his novels.
If
it has often been said that his characters were real
people to him, and that he seriously debated if so-and-so were a
better match for Mlle. de Grandlieu, or for Eugenie Grandet, one
can say that his life was a novel which he set about in exactly the
same spirit. There was no dividing line between real life (which as
you and I think, is not real) and the life in his novels (which for
the writer is the only true life). In the letters to his sister where he
talks about the possibilities of this marriage to Mme. Hanska, not
only is everything built up like a novel, but those involved are placed,
analyzed, described, seen as factors in the development of the plot,
as if in one of his books. Wishing to impress on her how his mother
writes to him as if he were a little boy, and how the disclosure not
only of his debts but of the family insolvency might bring the mar–
riage to nothing and incline Mme. Hanska toward another suitor,
he writes exactly as he might write in
Le
Cure de Tours:
The dismayed sculptor says to himself, Why the devil did my
mother write to me, why the devil must my sister in Calcutta write to
me about the fix she was in! Why didn't my brother keep quiet? See
where this has got us to! I had the chance of a marriage that would
have made a rich man of me, and best of all, a happy man. Everything's
gone to wrack and ruin for a lot of nonsense.
Just as his sister, his brother-in-law, his mother2 (the mother
for whom, much as he adores her, he feels none of that touching hu–
mility of those great men who always remain children where their
mother is concerned and forget, as she does, that they are geniuses)
interest us as characters in that novel of his life:
Un Grand Mariage,
2 He said: "the mother of a man like me," and when he speaks of how
fond he is of her, how humble before her, it is the same as when he depicts
the ideal angelic nature of Mme. de Mortsauf; he embosses and glorifies and
overloads that ideal but the mean alloy is still there; his ideal woman is none
the less a woman who enjoyed having her shoulders kissed by a strange man,
who understood and could teach how to get on in the world. His angels are
Rubens angels, winged, and showing a great deal of bosom.
