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PARTISAN REVIEW
the most austerely orthodox popes have never dreamed of, conferred
privileges on dukes that Saint-Simon, for all his high opinion of
dukedoms, would have been quite dumbfounded to see bestowed on
them. "The Duke gave Mme. Camusot one of those swift glances
by which the lords of the land can analyze a whole lifetime, and
often a soul itself. Oh, if the judge's wife could have known about
this ducal gift!"
If
the dukes of Balzac's day indeed possessed this
gift, it must be admitted that things have, as one says, somehow
changed.
Balzac does not always directly express that wonderment his
slightest remarks inspired in him. He entrusts the expression of it to
the characters engaged. There is a very famous story of his called
Autre Etude de Femme.
It
is made up of two narratives which do
not call for a large cast of walk-on parts; but almost all Balzac's
characters are grouped round the narrator, as in the
((a-propos,"
those "command performances" which the Comedie Franc;aise puts
on for anniversaries or centenaries. Each one chimes in with the ap–
propriate remark, as in those dialogues of the dead, too, in which
an author wants to parade a whole epoch. At every minute another
of them makes his appearance. De Marsay begins his narrative by
explaining that a statesman is a kind of monster of self-possession.
"Now you've explained why statesmen are so rare in France," says
old Lord Dudley. De Marsay goes on: "This monster became so,
thanks to a woman." "I fancied that in politics we were more de–
structive than constructive," says Mme. de Montcornet, with a smile
"If
this is to be a love story," says the Baronne de Nucingen, "I beg
that it will not be broken into by any moralizings." "Moralizing is
so out of place there," exclaims Joseph Bridau. And each on his cue,
the Princesse de Cadignan, Lady Barimore, the Marquise d'Espard,
Mlle. des Touches, Mme. de Vandenesse, Blondet, Daniel d'Arthez,
the Marquis de Montriveau, Count Adam Laginsky, etc., successively
speak their lines, as when on Moliere's birthday the members of the
society file past his statue and lay a pahn leaf before it. However,
this rather unconvincingly assembled public is exceedingly well–
inclined toward Balzac, quite as well-inclined as Balzac himself, whose
mouthpiece it is. When de Marsay has uttered the reflection : "True
and only love gives rise to a kind of bodily apathy in tune with the
contemplative state one sinks into. The mind tangles everything to-
