SAINTE-BEUVE AND BALZAC
575
a few years later he was himself to be Lucien de Rubempre; and
Lucien de Rubempre in the prison of the Conciergerie, seeing all
his brilliant worldly career in ruins about him, brought down by
the proof that he had been living in close friendship with a convict,
was but a foreshadowing-though of course Wilde did not know it
at the time-of just what was going to happen to Wilde.
In this last scene of the first part of Balzac's tetralogy (with
Balzac, the novel is seldom a whole; the whole consists of a cycle
in which the novel is a part),
4
every word, every incident, has an
underlying significance that Balzac gives the reader no hint of. These
implications arise from such a specialized psychological study, and
one which no one, Balzac excepted, has carried out, that it is a deli–
cate task to point them out. But doesn't everything, from the way
Vautrin stops Lucien on the road, when he does not know him and
so could only be attracted to him by his good looks, to the involun–
tary gesture with which he takes his arm, doesn't it all betray the
very different significance of the theories about very definite domina–
tion, about a pact of friendship, etc., by means of which the pre–
tended Canon glozes to Lucien's eyes, and to his own, maybe, an
unadmitted thought? And the interpolation of the man who couldn't
help eating paper, isn't that, too, admirably indicative of Vautrin's
character, and of characters like him-one of their favorite lines of
argument, the modicum of their secret that they will let out? But
indisputably the finest thing is the marvelous passage where the two
travelers pass the tumble-down manor house where Rastignac was
born. I call that the
Tristesse d'Olympio
of homosexual love: "He
would revisit all-the pool beside the spring."
We know from
Le Pere Coriot
that Vautrin at the Pension
Vauquer had entertained-though to no purpose-the same designs
for dominating Rastignac as he now entertains about Lucien. It came
to nothing, but Rastignac had been none the less deeply involved in
Vautrin's life.
It
was so that Rastignac might marry Victorine that
Vautrin contrived the murder of young Taillefer. Later on, when
Rastignac turns against Lucien, Vautrin, wearing a mask, will re-
4 Make plain Balzac's slow approach
(La FilZe aux Yeux d'or, Sarrazine,
La Duchesse de Langeais,
etc.), the noose gradually tightening on the subject,
then the devastating stranglehold at the end. And also the interpolation of
pas–
sages of time,
like geological fonnations where lava from different epochs lies
intenningled
(La: Duchesse de Langeais, Sarrazine).
