SAINTE-BEUVE AND BALZAC
567
way of adding splendor and stature to these characters and presenting
them as the finest of their kind-as Bianchon and Desplein are peers
of Claude Bernard and Laennec, and M. de Grandville of d'Agues–
seau: it is also the fault of one of Balzac's most cherished theories,
the theory of the great man to whom grea'tness of circumstances has
been denied, and because his real objective as a novelist is precisely
that: to be the historian of the unhistoried, and to study certain
characters of historic dimensions just as they manifest themselves
while lacking the historical factor which would impel them to great–
ness.
As
long as this is how Balzac sees them, it does not disconcert
us; but when Lucien de Rubempre, on the point of killing himself,
writes to Vautrin,
"If
God wills it so, these mysterious beings are
Moses, Attila, Charlemagne, Mahomet or Napoleon. But if he leaves
these gigantic instruments to rust beneath the ocean of a generation
they are no more than Pougatcheff, Fouche, Louvel, or the Abbe
Carlos Herrera. Farewell, then, farewell to you, who on the right
path could have been more than a Ximenes, more than a Richelieu,
etc.," Lucien talks too much like Balzac, and leaves off being a real
person, distinguishable from all others. And in spite of the amazing
variety of Balzac's characters, and their amazing degree of personal
identity, this, for one reason or another, sometimes happens.
We recognize Balzac in such passages, and we smile, not un–
kindly; but because he can be recognized, all the details that were
intended to make the characters of his novels more like people in real
life, have the opposite effect. The character lived; Balzac so plumes
himself on it that he mentions, quite needlessly, the sum of her dowry,
and her connections with other characters in
La
ComMie Humaine,
who are thus put on 'the footing of living people-which seems to
him to be killing two birds with one stone. "Mme. de Serizy (though
born a de Ronquerolles) was not on their visiting list." But because
one sees Balzac's legerdemain one loses a little of one's faith in the
reality of those Grandlieus who did not invite Mme. de Serizy to
their house. Though the impression made by the trickster's, or the
artist's, vitality is deepened, it is at the expense of the impression
made by the vitality of the work of art. A work of art, for all that;
and though it is a trifle eked out with all these overconvincing de–
tails, all this Musee Grevin business, they too are fuel to its fire, and
something is made of them. And as all this relates to an epoch,
